Do the Maths. The New Register of British Slave Traders Doesn’t Add Up
23rd September 2026
As an example of the problem, in the article in The Guardian on the Church of England and the slave trade we are told that 45 clergymen can be traced who invested in the slave trade.[ii] The author seems shocked. But is this a large number or a small one? Pettigrew and Co. do not say. But do the maths: in 1550 there were just shy of 9000 Anglican parishes across England and Wales, and about a 1000 more in Scotland. In 1800 the relative numbers were 11,000 in England and Wales and about 950 in Scotland. What’s surprising is not how many Anglican clerics invested in the slave trade across 250 years, but how few. But they won’t tell you that in The Guardian, probably because they haven’t thought to make the necessary calculations.
Pettigrew accepts that ‘slave traders were a tiny minority of the British population’ but gives them ‘outsized influence on this golden age of British development’.[iii] Yet the scale of that influence is never calibrated, merely asserted. ‘Interest in human trafficking’ apparently ‘cascaded down the social hierarchy’ but the 13,000 named individuals include no agricultural labourers or early industrial workers who made up the vast bulk of British society. This is hardly surprising as the Legacies of British Slavery project at University College, London – a much better example of scholarship than this Register – has estimated that somewhere between 5% and 15% of the British elite derived wealth from slavery, a group that might be numbered as a few thousand only, therefore.[iv]