The Crown's Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery in the Americas – Royal Profit and the Roots of Racial Injustice

The Crown's Silence examines the British royal family's financial involvement in slavery from the 1560s through the present day. Historian Brooke N. Newman documents how the monarchy invested in the transatlantic slave trade and built a slave empire in colonial America and the Caribbean, profiting from the labor of millions of enslaved Africans. The book challenges the widely accepted narrative that Britain was an abolitionist nation that rejected slavery without internal conflict, unlike the United States. Newman traces how royal investments in African slave trading and hereditary bondage set the stage for other colonial powers to develop brutal slave systems that persisted long after full British emancipation in 1838. The book argues that the consequences of this history remain visible globally through economic inequality, educational and health disparities, and racial discrimination. Rather than focusing on royal portraits, Newman centers the actions, investments, and struggles of enslaved people of African origin and ancestry in Britain's historical narrative, while examining how Crown officials continue to characterize slavery's legacies as belonging to the past.