The Crown’s Silence: The Hidden History of Slavery and the British Monarchy

The Wilberforce Institute welcomes Dr Brooke Newman for a riveting discussion of her groundbreaking new book, The Crown’s Silence.

Join Dr Brooke Newman for a riveting discussion of her groundbreaking new book, The Crown’s Silence, which exposes the British monarchy’s deep entanglement in the transatlantic slave trade and colonial slavery. Spanning four centuries - from the Tudors to Queen Victoria - Dr Newman traces how successive monarchs, and the institution of the monarchy itself, invested in, profited from, and legitimised an Atlantic empire built on human bondage. Drawing on extensive archival research, she reveals the extent to which royal power and wealth were intertwined with slavery’s expansion - and how the Crown’s silence has shaped public memory to this day.

Biography:

Dr Brooke Newman is an Associate Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She specialises in the history of early modern Britain and the British Atlantic, with a focus on slavery and its legacies. She is the author of the award-winning book, A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica (Yale, 2018), and The Crown's Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery in the Americas (Mariner, 2026). Her writing and research have been featured in the Guardian, the Washington Post, Der Spiegel, and Smithsonian Magazine, and she has served as a historical expert for HBO's Last Week Tonight, Vox, the BBC, and NPR, among others.