A statue of plantation and slave owner Robert Milligan is pictured being removed on June 9 2020 by workers outside the Museum of London Docklands near Canary Wharf, following the death of George Floyd who died in police custody in Minneapolis. Picture: REUTERS/JOHN SIBLEY
The City of London is interwoven with so many layers of history, from Roman to medieval, civil war and the age of empire, that the lives of the myriad figures who contributed to its status today are often obscured by time. The “triangle trade” involved shipping manufactured goods to western Africa and exchanging them for human beings, who were transported in appalling conditions to the Caribbean and sold as slaves to work in the plantations.
Walk through the warren of ancient streets lined with discrete Victorian facades and modern steel-and-glass towers that make up London’s Square Mile, effectively a city within a city, and it’s possible to find echoes of that legacy. In 1672, came the founding of the Royal African Company, an enterprise backed by the Crown that historian William Pettigrew has said “shipped more enslaved African women, men and children to the Americas than any other single institution” during the transatlantic slave trade.
Still, the Guildhall off Moorgate, the ceremonial and administrative centre of the City since the 15th century, illustrates the difficulty in unpicking and assigning guilt to institutions. Inside is a statue of William Beckford, a two-term lord mayor and owner of thousands of acres of Jamaican plantations worked by slaves. The Guildhall was also the scene of a court case on the killing of more than 100 slaves at sea that spurred the antislavery movement, leading to full abolition in 1833.