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Church of England confronts slavery ties as records show 45 clergy invested in slave trade

The Guardian reports that 45 Church of England clergymen invested in the Royal African Company, as the archbishop of Canterbury recommits the church to repentance for slavery.

AI News Feed · 2026-09-16 14:55

The visit came nearly 250 years after Cugoano made the Christian case for reparative justice. After witnessing the dungeons beneath the chapel at Cape Coast Castle, once run by the Royal African Company (RAC), Mullally made the commitment. The RAC trafficked more African men, women and children than any other single organisation in the history of the slave trade.

Historians working on the newly digitised Register of British Slave Traders found that 45 Church of England clergymen invested in the RAC, helping to fund hundreds of slaving voyages and a 1720 relaunch of the company. Among them was Henry Brydges, later a canon at St Paul’s Cathedral, who bought half of his £10,000 shareholding on the day he became the Archdeacon of Rochester. Prof William Pettigrew, who led the project, said the register showed a “truly national picture”. Profits from enslavement filtered down to communities “from Cumbria to the Cotswolds” through bequests to parishes, he added, evidence of a history of the Church of England “giving slavery its blessing” and raising fresh questions about whether the church is doing enough to atone.

In 2023, church commissioners, the Church of England’s asset managers, launched Project Spire, a £100m impact investment fund for communities affected by slavery’s legacies. The fund has caused division within the church. It is not a reparations fund but is central to the church’s determination to be a force for justice and healing in the world. It was launched nearly 20 years after Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury, rejected the idea that today’s church bears no responsibility for the past. Project Spire mainly responds to historic investments in the South Sea Company, which trafficked close to 45,000 enslaved Africans. Prof Alan Lester, a historical geographer at the University of Sussex, said this represented a “sliver of church complicity”.

Lester said that complicity helped shape modern Britain. Plantation profits helped fuel the Industrial Revolution, railways, public health, welfare, universities, schools, church building and the public finances, he said. “Look at Anglican parishes in Jamaica, their ability to withstand climate change, and compare that with the wealth generated in Britain by the plantation complex,” he said.

For the Rev Natasha Beckles, the dean of racial justice for Willesden, reckoning with this past goes to the heart of Christian faith. “What was the purpose of the cross if we’re not able to talk about this?” she said. “Slavery made the image of God transactional. There has to be an understanding of the impact on the world.” Dr Leona Vaughn of the University of Liverpool, a co-organiser of a 2025 Anglican “truth-telling” event, said: “The public and people within the church don’t even know the extent of the church’s involvement.” She added that the church had “not even started to come to terms with the ‘Slave Bible’,” a Church of England-sanctioned, heavily edited Bible, stripped of liberation narratives, that planters used as a tool of social control from 1807.

The history of the United Society Partners in the Gospel (USPG), the Church of England’s 325-year-old missionary partner, shows how powerful Anglicans practised and perpetuated transatlantic chattel slavery, a uniquely racialised, violent system of human commodification and forced mass migration. Today, members of USPG, of which Mullally is president, have committed to “the gospel’s call to break every chain of injustice”. USPG’s forerunner, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), supplied chaplains to the RAC at Cape Coast Castle. For more than 120 years, with the involvement of Church of England leaders, SPG enslaved people on the Codrington estate in Barbados, which generated the equivalent of £5m a year in today’s money.

At Codrington, enslaved Africans were branded with the word “Society”, tortured with the lash, straitjacket and iron collar, and worked to death. In seven months in 1746, 19 enslaved people died, including Daniel, who was “shot by accident”, with three deaths in a single day. Pettigrew said the “clear signal” sent by the Church of England’s relationship with Codrington was “if the church is doing it, why shouldn’t I?” After abolition, SPG and at least 96 clergy who enslaved people received millions in compensation for “loss of property”. In 2023, USPG launched its own £7m reparative justice programme.

Christian collusion can be traced back to a 1452 papal bull authorising the enslavement of non-Christians, the author Malik Al Nasir said. He wants the Church of England to digitise its records in the UK and the Caribbean.