A crown branded onto bodies links British monarchy to slave trade

[David Lockmiller]

Washington Post Headline:
A crown branded onto bodies links British monarchy to slave trade
September 28, 2023

Thumbing through the tanned pages of centuries-old records in the basement of the British Library, Nicholas Radburn came across an illustration that took him aback.

A crown resembling the iconic St. Edward’s headpiece from British coronations sat atop the letters S and C, apparently a stylized reference to the slave-trading South Sea Company. The accompanying text, written in 1715, declared that this was “the Mark henceforward, to be put upon the Bodys of the Negros to be sold & Dipos’d of in the Spanish West Indies,” under a contract between Britain’s late Queen Anne and Spain’s King Philip V.

“It was striking,” said Radburn, a historian at Lancaster University, who discovered the illustration as part of a project to digitize the records of the South Sea Company and its monopoly over the trade of enslaved Africans to the Spanish-held Americas.

Hot-ironing initials into the flesh of captives was a horrid but common practice in the era of the transatlantic slave trade. These brands were used to establish ownership claims, as a means of identification, for accounting purposes and to regulate sales.