San Francisco Frontiers - Historians Reveal Extent of Insurers' Role in Transatlantic Slave Trade

Academics are slowly piecing together the financial networks behind the transatlantic trafficking of 'human cargo,' revealing the extent to which historic insurance markets facilitated the trade. While the UK government is considering a formal apology for Britain’s role in the slave trade, Lloyd’s of London issued an apology six years ago, expressing deep regret for its "significant role" in the trafficking and the suffering it caused. The marketplace has since installed a commemorative plaque at its London headquarters.

More consequential than the apology has been the research that followed. Through an independent collaboration with Johns Hopkins University in the United States, researchers Alexandre White and Pyar Seth examined Lloyd’s archives for the Underwriting Souls project. Their work laid bare how merchant insurers, some linked through predecessor businesses to major insurers operating today, underwrote ships carrying enslaved people across the Atlantic and, in some cases, the enslaved people themselves.

However, historians interviewed by specialist news title InsuranceERM argue that the full extent of the insurance industry’s involvement remains far from understood. White, now an assistant professor at the University of Cambridge, noted that part of the problem is the fragmented nature of surviving evidence. Risk books, which are ledgers in which individual underwriters recorded their business, are particularly rare and provide only a snapshot of an underwriter’s activity.

"There could be tons," White said when asked how much more evidence remains to be uncovered. "It’s possible we’ll find more. It’s possible much has been destroyed … or lost to time."

Despite these gaps, White stated that researchers are getting "a much clearer sense of the scale and importance of insurance to slavery." Work conducted in London, Liverpool, and Bristol is helping to piece together the financial networks that supported the trade.

One area where researchers are breaking new ground is Liverpool, through the Connector Project. This £1 million initiative is funded by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation, an independent charity separate from Lloyd’s of London but with historical links to enslavement, and facilitated by National Museums Liverpool. Its first pilot study, Overwriting Underwriting, is already piecing together fresh evidence about the role of insurers.

Lucy Moynihan, a PhD student and research associate on the project, has been examining the 1797 risk book of John Gladstone. Gladstone was an enslaver and merchant who later became the first chair of the Liverpool Underwriters’ Association. Moynihan said previous histories had overlooked his role as an underwriter in the trafficking of enslaved people. Her research has identified voyages in his risk book connected to enslavement, adding underwriting information missing from existing datasets.

Central to this research is reconstructing the networks behind the business. Malik Al Nasir, an academic, author, and Connector Project manager, explained that Liverpool’s merchants, shipowners, bankers, and underwriters were often connected through their families and commercial interests. Because merchants acted as underwriters, evidence can sit in private family and business collections. Moynihan emphasized that private archives have a responsibility to "do a review of what they have" and give the public access to their records.

Al Nasir’s own research has involved sourcing material from disparate repositories and even eBay due to gaps in established archives. This approach led him to a letter referring to insurance for the sloop Speedwell, which he says does not appear in the widely used Slave Voyages database.

"If I can just find randomly from one letter one slave ship that’s not mentioned on the Slave Voyages database, then there must be many others as well," he said.

Historians also believe more remains to be uncovered about what happened after Britain outlawed the transatlantic slave trade in 1807. Hannah Farber, an associate professor at Columbia University in New York City, noted that British insurers were "pretty openly still involved with the insurance of foreign slave voyages after 1807."

As enforcement tightened, Farber said that involvement became harder to trace, with financiers finding more covert ways to take on the risks of slave voyages without formally underwriting them.

"It’s a lot easier to stop slave ships than it is to stop slave insurance," she said.

Farber believes there is still substantial work to be done connecting the financial centres of London, Liverpool, and New York with Brazil and Cuba, where enslavement remained legal later into the 19th century. "There’s so much more to learn about insurance in the slave trade," she added.

White said the records also revealed that enslaved people were reduced to financial assets within the insurance system. "African lives at this time could still provide value not just from their bodies, not just from their labour, but also in their death," he said.

After its apology, Lloyd’s of London committed £52 million, including £12 million for Inclusive Futures initiatives to help Black and ethnically diverse individuals participate and progress "from the classroom to the boardroom." It also pledged to earmark £40 million towards profit-making investments in the African Development Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, which has programmes in the Caribbean.

Lloyd’s efforts to address its historical support for the slave trade were criticised as "completely inadequate" at the time by academic Kehinde Andrews. The race equality thinktank the Runnymede Trust welcomed Lloyd’s work to acknowledge its history but said it needed to do more to address issues such as its ethnic pay gap.

A deeper examination of the research and what it means for insurers can be found in the InsuranceERM podcast episode, Why insurance’s reckoning with the transatlantic slave trade is far from over, released on 10 November.

Y.Harris--SFF