The Crown's Silence

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.

A work of ground-breaking original research and narrative synthesis, it exposes the ways in which the British monarchy invested in, expanded, and defended the transatlantic slave trade for nearly three centuries and how it continues to profit from systems of racial exploitation to this day – while remaining silent in the face of that legacy. It will reveal how the Crown effectively ruptured and reshaped Britain’s national narrative and collective memory of its own colonial past as well as the consequences of that deafening silence.

As former British colonies in the Caribbean consider severing their ties with the Crown (and the British royal family sends emissaries to try to keep them), The Crown’s Silence tells a history that is very much in the headlines – and will no doubt continue to be. It will be the next chapter in revealing the lost histories of not only Britain and the United States, but of our world.

Author Biography

Brooke N. Newman is Associate Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She is the author of the award-winning and critically acclaimed A DARK INHERITANCE: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica, (Yale University Press, 2018) and co-editor of NATIVE DIASPORAS: Indigenous Identities and Settler Colonialism in the Americas (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). Her scholarship focuses on race, gender, and slavery in the colonial British Atlantic, and her writing and research have appeared in Slate, the Washington Post, Der Spiegel, and the Times Literary Supplement, among other publications.