The BBC and Professor David Olusoga have announced a new two-part documentary series, Finding Britain’s Slave Traders with David Olusoga.
The documentary will uncover new evidence about the individuals, institutions and organisations who financed Britain’s trade in enslaved Africans from the Tudor age to the abolition of the slave trade in 1807.
The BBC said Finding Britain’s Slave Traders is based on exclusive access to the findings of a new academic research project, led by Professor William Pettigrew of King’s College London, which has created a database of 13,000 British slave traders. The database will be made publicly available when the series is broadcast.
The documentary will trace how the British slave trade was originally run by monopoly companies set up by the Stuart monarchy, before transferring to independent traders based in cities such as Liverpool and Bristol.
In a previous 2014 series Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners, David Olusoga explored the compensation paid to Britain’s slave owners when slavery in the British Empire was abolished in 1833.
The research for that series was based on records created by the Slave Compensation Commission that have been digitised and are available to view along with other online Caribbean records.
David Olusoga said: “This new series is a follow-up to a series we made over a decade ago; Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners. Both series have been built on the very latest academic research that allows us to reveal new details from our expanding understanding of slavery and the slave trade. Like the previous series Finding Britain’s Slave Traders presents the granular details and human stories that lie at the centre of this vast and complicated history.”
Finding Britain’s Slave Traders with David Olusoga will air on BBC Two later this year.
