Sir John Moore

The City of London & The Slave Trade Part 7

On the whole it is easier to identify City of London aldermen who were directors and investors in the slave trading Royal Africa Company (RAC) than common councillors from the same local authority. This is, of course, because aldermen generally held a more elevated social status and were richer – although many common councillors were and are wealthy. Nonetheless, J. R. Woodhead’s Rulers of London 1660-1690 provides a good guide to the involvement of not just aldermen but also common councillors who were Africa Company directors and investors for a limited period of the RAC’s existence. So here we extract from Rulers information about those who were only common councillors and didn’t become aldermen, but who did invest in the RAC and/or participated in organising the slave trade as its directors.

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The City of London & The Slave Trade Part 4

A continuation of sketches of senior City of London councillors (aldermen) who were directors of the slave trading Royal Africa Company in the seventeenth-century, alongside remarks on various contemporary organisations responsible for memorials and other references to them that require actions such as removal of object, renaming or a more rigorous historical framing. The contemporary organisations addressed in this post include the National Portrait Gallery, Art UK, Hermitage Museum, Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London Corporation, Bank of England and Bank of England Museum.

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The City Of London & The Slave Trade Part 3

Sketches of senior City of London councillors (aldermen) who were directors of the slave trading Royal Africa Company in the seventeenth-century, alongside remarks on various contemporary organisations responsible for memorials and other references to them that require actions such as removal of object, renaming or a more rigorous historical framing. The contemporary organisations addressed include the National Portrait Gallery, Art UK, Milton Keynes Arts Centre, Royal Collection Trust, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London Corporation, John Moore Foundation, Museum of the Home, Ironmongers’ Company and Sir Robert Geffery’s Trust.

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The City of London & The Slave Trade Part 2

When we began our look at the huge overlap between the slave trading Royal Africa Company and the City of London council we quoted Historic England on this entanglement. We chose this particular source because it emphasised that the Guildhall (the City of London council offices) was a centre of the slave trade. That said we could see that the numbers used were drawn from the book The Royal African Company by K. G. Davies (Longmans Green, 1957), since on pages 68/69 Davies states: “Fifteen of the Lord Mayors of London, between the Restoration and the Revolution, and twenty-five of the Sheriffs were shareholders in the company, as were thirty-eight of the men elected or appointed aldermen between 1672 and 1690.” Historic England use the same figures and time frame in what we quoted from them. It’s important to understand that these numbers do not cover the overlaps between the City of London council and the Royal Africa Society during the entire history of this slave trading operation, just its earlier phase.

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The City of London & The Slave Trade Part 1

When discussing English slave trading the Royal Africa Company and the East India Company are key reference points and both have deep roots in the City of London. Many of the individuals implicated in the black holocaust through their involvement in these two slave trading entities also played key roles in local government in the City of London including as lord mayors, sheriffs and members of livery companies. Some of these slave traders are still memorialised in the City of London. Memorials tend to erase the complexities of history through simple celebration, which is why their removal from public spaces generally enhances historical understanding. That said, the undemocratic and still in many ways feudal local government machinery of the City of London is also in its contemporary form a product of the slave trade and it is more important that this is dismantled than that statues are removed and streets get renamed. It would, however, be ideal if both the governance of the City was democratically reformed and its problematic memorials removed.

Read more "The City of London & The Slave Trade Part 1"