Brooke Newman will discuss her landmark new book, The Crown’s Silence, a revelatory history of the British monarchy’s centuries-long involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and colonial slavery. Spanning from the Tudor era to the reign of Queen Victoria, Newman traces how successive monarchs authorized, financed, profited from, and defended systems of African bondage across the Atlantic world. Racial slavery, she argues, was built into the machinery of empire, underwriting royal power, wealth extraction, and British overseas expansion. Drawing on extensive archival research, Newman exposes both the Crown’s active role in sustaining slavery and the deliberate silences that followed abolition. The Crown’s Silence challenges familiar narratives of moral progress and imperial benevolence, revealing how monarchical authority shaped racial capitalism—and how these legacies continue to shape public memory and debates over Britain’s imperial past today.
