An Evening with Brooke Newman - Gower Street

A ground-breaking and essential work of history – the first of its kind to closely examine the British Royal Family’s connection with the transatlantic slave trade

The Crown's Silence is the untold story of the British royal family’s relationship to slavery from the reign of Elizabeth I to the present. It will be the first history of the British monarchy told through the lens of its intimate, centuries-long relationship with African slave trading, slavery, and racial injustice.

An extremely timely, excoriating and shocking new history, The Crown’s Silence examines the royal family’s centuries-long investment in slavery and how it continues to profit from systems of racial exploitation to this day, while remaining silent in the face of that legacy, insisting it “belongs to the past”. The monarchy expanded and defended the slave trade for nearly three centuries. It built a slave empire that enriched the Crown, facilitated Britain’s rise as a global power and perpetrated violence on millions of enslaved Africans, Indigenous people and their descendants. Brooke reveals this untold history, the scars of which remain visible all over the world and asks the question: will King Charles III become the first British monarch to break the Crown’s Silence?

Brooke N. Newman is an award-winning historian at Virginia Commonwealth University and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She is the author of the critically acclaimed A DARK INHERITANCE: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica, a finalist for the Frederick DouglassBook Prize. Her scholarship focuses on race, gender, and slavery in the colonial British Atlantic,and her writing and research have appeared in The Guardian, The Washington Post, BBC and theTimes Literary Supplement, amongst others.

Belle Ribeiro-Addy is the MP for Clapham and Brixton Hill

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