When Britain abolished slavery, plantation owners from powerful families notoriously received huge sums in compensation, while those who were enslaved got nothing.<\/p>\n
Now evidence has come to light that Sandbach, Tinne<\/a> and Company \u2013 a corporation closely linked to the merchants who got the biggest taxpayer-funded compensation payouts \u2013 continued to traffic enslaved Africans illegally after abolition to Guyana, in South America.<\/p>\n The discovery is detailed in a book, Searching for My Slave Roots<\/a>, by author Malik Al Nasir<\/a>, who has been researching his family history.<\/p>\n Its findings have inspired a new research project, Overwriting-Underwriting<\/a>, which aims to uncover the financial networks behind enslavement and launches on Sunday, the International Day of Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition.<\/p>\n The Slave Trade Act of 1807 abolished the trade in human beings in British territories. Then, in 1833, the Slavery<\/a> Abolition Act banned slavery itself in most of the British empire.<\/p>\n But an 1847 letter, written to Sandbach Tinne\u2019s Liverpool<\/a> office by Peter Miller Watson, who managed the company\u2019s interests in Demerara, Guyana, refers to a ship from the company\u2019s own fleet arriving with a \u201ccargo of negroes\u201d, including dozens of young children.<\/p>\n Malik Al-Nasir whose book, Searching for My Slave Roots, has prompted research to uncover the financial networks behind enslavement. Photograph: Tom Jenkins\/The Guardian<\/p>\n The letter details how the ship, called \u201cthe Parker\u201d, was carrying \u201c115 adult males, 86 adult females, 82 under 14 years, and 41 under 4 years,\u201d adding: \u201cThere have been only three casualties during the passage \u2013 1 man and 2 children \u2013 which Captain R. says may be attributed to the wretched state in which they had lived ashore.\u201d<\/p>\n Malik said: \u201cSlavery had been abolished, so how do we know the people on the Parker weren\u2019t indentured, or Africans liberated by the Royal Navy? Firstly, Watson specifically refers to them as cargo, and not passengers, when liberated Africans were not regarded as cargo, enslaved people were called cargo.<\/p>\n \u201cIn referring to the \u2018wretched state\u2019 in which they had lived ashore, he\u2019s saying they were shipped from land and are the architects of their own condition \u2013 if they had been previously enslaved blame would have been on their former masters, and they would not have been bought if they were sick. When [Watson] talks about casualties, he\u2019s attributing the deaths as a loss of property. By process of deduction, we can see these are people illegally trafficked from Africa.\u201d<\/p>\n Charles Stuart Parker Jr was one of Sandbach Tinne\u2019s principal shareholders in 1847. Photograph: Sandbach Tinne Collection of Cambridge<\/p>\n Peter Miller Watson was a distant cousin of the British prime minister William Gladstone and the father of Andrew Watson, who became the first Black international footballer when he captained Scotland in the 1880s.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Sandbach Tinne, which was wound up in 1975, was the family business of the Sandbach and Tinne families, who, along with their collaborators and relatives in the Gladstone family, dominated the Demerara sugar trade.<\/p>\n By the time of the 1847 letter, Sandbach Tinne and their subsidiaries had already received compensation equivalent to millions of pounds today for the \u201closs\u201d of the people they enslaved before abolition. While family patriarch Samuel Sandbach had left the partnership in 1833, his son William Robertson Sandbach and son-in-law Charles Stuart Parker Jr were principal shareholders in 1847. British taxpayers\u2019 debt for compensation payments to enslavers was only paid off in 2015<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cJohn Gladstone, the father of William Gladstone who owned plantations in Guyana<\/a> and Jamaica, got the biggest single individual payout, while Sandbach Tinne got the second largest on aggregate \u2013 both were among architects of the compensation scheme,\u201d Malik added.<\/p>\n An 1823 uprising in Demerara<\/a>, staged by enslaved abolitionists, was a pivotal event in the fight to abolish slavery, and began on a plantation owned by John Gladstone.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a>Free newsletter | Monthly<\/p>\n Sign up to Cotton Capital<\/p>\n Starting with the Guardian\u2019s own history, Guardian journalists explore the legacies of enslavement and reparative justice around the world<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n But Al Nasir said an 1847 missionary account <\/a>detailed how unregulated trading in enslaved people existed \u201csouth of the line\u201d \u2013 meaning enslavers evading the Royal Navy\u2019s blockade continued to traffic people from countries below the equator, such as Angola.<\/p>\n William Robertson Sandbach received compensation equivalent to millions of pounds after abolition. Photograph: Sandbach Tinne Collection of Cambridge<\/p>\n The Royal Navy\u2019s West Africa Squadron<\/a> was tasked with intercepting slavers\u2019 ships from 1808, with 1,600 sailors losing their lives. However, it is estimated that fewer than 10% of ships involved in enslaving people were intercepted.<\/p>\n Even when ships were successfully stopped, \u201cliberated Africans\u201d faced military conscription and hard, unpaid labour under the apprenticeship<\/a> and indentured labour systems.<\/p>\n \u201cOverwriting \u2013 Underwriting\u201d launches at the Museum of Liverpool on Sunday. The event features renowned Jamaican academic Prof Verene Shepherd as keynote speaker, and a panel including Al Nasir and Lucy Moynihan from the University of Liverpool, chaired by Michelle Charters, the head of the International Slavery Museum.<\/p>\n The initiative is inspired by research from Moynihan into John Gladstone\u2019s insurance \u201crisk books\u201d as well as Al Nasir\u2019s research into Sandbach Tinne.<\/p>\n It is a pilot for the Connector project, a National Museums Liverpool initiative to develop understanding of transatlantic slavery\u2019s legacies, supported by a \u00a31m grant from Lloyd\u2019s Register Foundation.<\/p>\n