Carol Grose reviews a book about the policies of the British Monarchy:
"The Crown’s Silence gives a clear view into the British monarchy’s long entanglement with the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas. Frequently, omissions allowed scholars to avoid highlighting and analysing the British royal family’s role in encouraging and profiting from the slave trade and slavery. When Elizabeth I became queen, England’s finances were in a parlous state, and to rectify this she encouraged traders to follow the lead of Portugal and Spain and plunder west Africa. When she understood the profitability of the slave trade, she offered her political support, eventually investing herself and loaning navy warships as protection against the Spanish and Portuguese. The monarchs who followed Elizabeth used her strategy of investment and using military support to perpetuate the slave trade. Newman’s comprehensive and careful archival work demonstrates the significance of scrutinizing business transactions and policy to establish historical patterns. She shows the economic and political importance of slavery to the British monarchy and how, when abolishing the slave trade became a popular moral cause, the royal family became more oblique about how they benefitted.

"Throughout The Crown’s Silence, Newman builds the argument by using a variety of archives that show how the monarchy was tied to commercial interests within the city of London. Credit facilities developed to facilitate the slave trade and the slave dependent plantation economies in the Americas. The historical narrative is at its strongest when she describes how the legal framework around slaveholding became more complicated in the eighteenth century in part because the British wanted to create a distinction between themselves and the “venal slavers” in America, creating a tiered system where slaves of African descent in the British isles had the potential for liberty. Creating the distinction fueled the abolition movement which peaked around the time Queen Victoria came to the throne. After slavery was abolished in the Caribbean, because people of African descent were put into a harsh form of coerced apprenticeship. As Newman points out, there was colonial campaign to credit Queen Victoria with the end of slavery and apprenticeship, although, unlike the slaveholders, they received no compensation for their years of labor. Moreover, Newman concludes that Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, the standard for future royal “statements without teeth or legal implications; statements carefully crafted to highlight Britain’s abolition efforts and erase centuries of racial exploitation and violence by omission.”

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