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Lloyd’s of London has pledged $50mn to global development projects, as part of a programme aimed at addressing lasting inequalities from the transatlantic slave trade that it enabled.
The pledge comes three years after the insurance market apologised for its role in the trade, which included extending crucial insurance to voyages and even insuring slaves as cargo. Still, Lloyds has decided against offering direct financial compensation to descendants of enslaved people, despite calls.
Historic evidence of Lloyd’s links to the transatlantic slave trade will be published on Wednesday by Black Beyond Data, a project based at Johns Hopkins University.
“Lloyd’s was quite central, we can see, to the maintenance of the Atlantic slave trade and also profited, most likely significantly, from it,” said Alexandre White, assistant professor at Johns Hopkins, who led the independently funded project.
Research materials that are being made publicly available in digital form include a risk book from a senior member of Lloyd’s governing committee in the early 19th century, Horatio Clagett. This documents underwriting details relating to over 60 voyages, including the direction and fate of the ships.
White said the materials underlined the relationship between Lloyd’s and the African Company of Merchants, a key slave-trading venture, and revealed the role of several members of the governing committee in the early 19th century, who had significant personal involvement in the trade.
Bruce Carnegie-Brown, Lloyds’s current chair, said the market was “deeply sorry” for this part of its history. The $50mn pledged by Lloyd’s will be channelled to places directly affected by slavery, and administered by the African Development Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, which serves Latin America and the Caribbean.
Carnegie-Brown added that it was also important “to create more opportunities for people who today have fewer opportunities than people like I do”.
Lloyd’s said it has hired 3,000 people into the market from black and ethnic minority backgrounds since it issued its first apology in 2020 and set an ethnic-diversity hiring target. It will also establish fresh programmes for black and ethnic-minority talent, and a permanent memorial at the Lloyd’s building to remember the victims of slavery.
But he defended Lloyd’s decision to not offer direct financial compensation to descendants of enslaved people. “I’m not persuaded that this is just about money,” he said. “I think it needs to be about more than money, in terms of the engagement that we can have.”
Compensation was “an incredibly challenging issue,” said White. “The scale and scope and role of slavery in modern life is such that establishing an adequate solution is incredibly difficult, if not completely impossible, but I think Lloyd’s is aiming to make really meaningful change.”
The research can be accessed at underwritingsouls.org
