Enslavement and Colonialism

NatWest itself started trading in 1970, but its origins come from a complex family tree of much older banks. More than 100 of these were founded in the 18th and early 19th centuries, when the enslavement, trafficking and exploitation of African people was a fact of British commercial life. This means that some of our archives from those times offer valuable insights into the events, systems and motives that underpinned this shameful practice.

Resources

We support work to uncover and share a better understanding of this history by welcoming historians into our archives to do their research. Recognising that not everybody can visit our archives in person, we have also started publishing on this website digitised versions of key sources pertaining to this history, such as:

The ledgers (1663-1672) of the London goldsmith-banker Edward Backwell, which include details of some of the earliest shareholders in the Royal African Company
Records of the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies (1695-1707), an early and failed attempt at Scottish colonialism
The letters of Robert Scott Moncrieff, Glasgow agent of the Royal Bank of Scotland, 1801-1803, which provide a rare insight into trade and life in one of Britain’s key west-facing ports

By working with the experts who use these records, we are coming to a deeper understanding of the role of banks and bankers in Britain’s slavery history. The following summarises what we know so far.

Customers

Most of our banks' customer records have not survived, so we cannot meaningfully assess the proportion who were involved in slavery, or the extent to which banks benefited from their custom. Nevertheless, people with wealth were the most likely to have bank accounts, and there can be no doubt that people whose money came from slavery were among the customers of banks, including the predecessors of NatWest.

Some of these customers would have been absentee plantation owners; that is, people who lived in Britain, drawing the profits of plantation ownership but leaving day-to-day management to local agents. Others were merchants, involved in buying and selling colonial produce, or manufacturers, using slave-grown raw materials or selling their finished products in colonial markets.

Our archives contain several collections which do not seem to relate directly to bank business, but whose presence among bank records suggests a connection, perhaps because the records' owners were bank customers or because bank partners kept or used them as part of their personal business affairs. Some of these collections contain substantial records of plantation operations:

Papers regarding the estate of Nathaniel Bayly, West Indian plantation owner, 1780-1827: source overview (PDF 108 KB)
Papers relating to the Blagrove family, West Indian plantation owners, 1755-1764: source overview (PDF 212 KB)
Papers of James Lowther, Earl of Lonsdale regarding a Barbados plantation, 1690-1800: source overview (PDF 107 KB)
Papers of the trustees of the estate of Alexander Bartlet & Co, West Indian merchants, 1771-1815: source overview (PDF 112 KB)

Bristol banks

Several banks founded in Bristol between 1750 and 1810 went on to become part of NatWest. Very few archival records survive from any of them, but in view of Bristol’s deep involvement in trafficking enslaved people and importing the products of their labour, it is highly likely that many of the city’s merchants and others who had enough money to need a bank account, or indeed to start or own a bank, had profited in some way from this trade.

The Bristol-based banks represented in our history are: Miles, Cave, Baillie & Co, est.1750; Miles, Miles, Harford, Miles & Miles, est.1752; Harfords & Co, est. 1768; Cave, Ames & Cave, est.1786; Joseph Haythorne & George Wright, est.1794; Stuckey, Lean & Co, est.1806; and Ricketts, Thorne & Courtney, est.1810.

Hankey & Co (1685-1865)

Hankey & Co was a London bank founded by Captain Samuel Hankey, who was also partner in a West India merchant house. After his death the Hankey family continued the banking business, and also maintained close ties to the West Indies economy. In 1766 the bank provided a mortgage on a plantation (including enslaved people) in Grenada. After the owner defaulted, the bank came into ownership of the plantation until it was sold in 1772. Four of the bank’s partners received compensation at abolition in the 1830s.

Prescott’s Bank (1766-1903)

Smith, Payne & Smiths (1758-1902)

Smith, Payne & Smiths was a London-based partnership bank. Some of its earliest partners had personal financial interests in West Indies trade and plantation ownership, and although later partners took a seemingly anti-slavery stance in politics, their bank’s customer base included a number of London-based West India merchants. When some of these firms got into financial difficulties in the 1810s and 1820s, the bank accepted assignment of mortgages on slaveholding plantations as security in its debt recovery activities. In one instance, it directly contributed a proportion of the sum used to buy an additional group of enslaved people to work on a plantation, in a bid to return it to profitability so the debt could be reduced. When abolition compensation was paid in the 1830s, a substantial sum was paid to the partners of Smith, Payne & Smiths, either because the bank had become owner of forfeited plantations, or because the plantation owners were so indebted to the bank that the courts diverted the money to their creditors.