As the Caribbean Community Reparations Commission launches its most powerful manifesto yet for reparatory justice, a groundbreaking new book by American historian Brooke N Newman has provided the evidentiary foundation that Caribbean advocates have long sought — direct, documented proof that the British Crown did not merely permit Jamaica’s enslavement. It designed it, financed it, and profited from it for nearly three centuries.

Newman, an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, spent years tracing the monarchy’s links to the Transatlantic Slave Trade through colonial archives, state records, slave-trading company papers, and the Royal Archives themselves.

Her book, The Crown’s Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery in the Americas, published in January, has ignited a global conversation about royal accountability — and its timing could not be more consequential for Jamaica.

Newman’s research reveals that Jamaica’s role as the centre of Britain’s slave empire was a deliberate Crown decision — not the by-product of private commerce. Under Oliver Cromwell, English forces seized Jamaica from Spain in the 1650s, recognising its strategic value as a plantation hub. Under King Charles II, Jamaica was systematically developed into the jewel of Britain’s slave empire.

The Royal African Company – chartered by Charles II, governed by his brother James, Duke of York, and backed by the full power of the Royal Navy — delivered enslaved Africans primarily to Barbados and Jamaica, making those islands the engine of Britain’s colonial wealth.

“Jamaica would later become Britain’s most valuable Atlantic colony, a major slave society, and its developing plantation economy would drive up the demand for enslaved labour,” Newman stated in a recent public lecture. ”The Crown’s personal investment in Jamaica’s enslavement went beyond policy. James, Duke of York, the Royal African Company’s governor and largest shareholder, had his initials, DY, branded onto the bodies of hundreds of enslaved people working at the company’s coastal factories.”

Newman confirmed she found archival evidence documenting both the practice and the number of people branded.

Colonial governors appointed and paid by the Crown, including Jamaica’s Governor Thomas Modyford — were specifically tasked with overseeing slave-trading operations on the island. This was not a private enterprise. It was Crown administration.
Newman traces the Crown’s involvement in the slave trade from its Tudor origins. In 1564, Queen Elizabeth I became the first English monarch to directly invest in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, loaning her 700-ton Royal Navy warship, the Jesus of Lübeck, to merchant John Hawkins for slaving voyages to West Africa and the Caribbean.

The Queen received a share of the profits, equivalent to millions in today’s currency, and fully understood what she was financing.

By the time of the Restoration, Newman documents that Charles II, Queen Catherine, James Duke of York, the Queen Mother, and other Royals all subscribed large sums to the Royal African Company. Between 1672 and the early 1720s, the Company transported more than 150,000 enslaved Africans across the Atlantic — more than any other single institution.

The profits from Caribbean enslaved labour funded Britain’s rise as a global power. By the late 1680s, customs duties on plantation goods — primarily sugar from Jamaica — comprised a third of the Crown’s ordinary income. This was not peripheral revenue. It was foundational to the British state.

Even after the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, enslaved Jamaicans continued to suffer. The Duke of Clarence — the future King William IV — publicly defended slavery in the House of Lords, and his speeches were widely distributed to bolster the pro-slavery lobby.

“When Emancipation finally came in 1833, the British government paid £20 million in compensation to slave owners, not to the enslaved. The newly-freed were subjected to an unpaid apprenticeship system until 1838. The debt taken on to compensate slaveholders was not repaid by British taxpayers until 2015,” Newman said. “The formerly enslaved who ultimately received freedom received nothing — no payments, no land, nothing.”

One of the most poignant revelations in Newman’s research concerns how Jamaica’s enslaved population viewed the British Crown. Having heard of the Abolition Movement, enslaved Jamaicans staged major rebellions in 1816, 1823, and 1831-1832 — not to destroy the Empire but to appeal to it.

Newman describes a flag captured from Jamaican freedom fighters depicting enslaved people dressed as respectable British subjects, surrounded by lions, crowns, and naval vessels.

“This is not a flag about burning it all down,” she explained. “It is about how we are subjects, and we want to be treated as subjects.”

Their loyalty was met with silence.

Newman’s evidence arrives at a pivotal moment. Just this week, the Caribbean Community (Caricom) Reparations Commission launched an updated and strengthened manifesto for reparatory justice at a conference in Ghana, approved by a sub-committee of Caribbean leaders chaired by Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley.

Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, Chair of the Commission, told The Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom, that the manifesto is, “not about extraction of resources from the colonising countries”, but an opportunity for humanity to, “purge itself of the politics of racism.”

Key updates to the Caricom 10-Point Plan include strengthened legal arguments for monetary compensation, a specific focus on gender-based violence against enslaved women, climate justice as inextricably linked to reparations, and formal recognition that crimes against humanity are not subject to a statute of limitations.

“We believe that the legal case has been made,” Beckles stated. “We are now into phase two — the programme of reparatory action.”

The United Nations has recently declared the Transatlantic Slave Trade the gravest crime against humanity. Britain abstained from that vote.

Newman’s book now provides the evidentiary architecture to support what Caricom’s manifesto demands. Britain’s long-standing defence — that the Crown was a bystander while private merchants conducted the slave trade – is directly dismantled by the Royal Archives themselves.

King Charles III faces intensified calls at the upcoming 2026 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Antigua and Barbuda (November 1-4), where Caribbean member states are expected to press for formal acknowledgment and substantive commitments to repair.

When asked about Newman’s findings, Buckingham Palace stated only that, “The King does not respond to research.”