Slavery’s Mercantile Legacy

When protesters threw the statue of slave-trader Edward Colston into Bristol Harbour in June 2020, they forced a public reckoning that the Society of Merchant Venturers — Bristol’s oldest and most powerful mercantile elite — had long avoided. But the story this book tells does not end, or begin, in 2020. It begins in the counting houses of the triangular trade and ends in the boardrooms of philanthrocapitalism, tracing an unbroken thread of wealth, influence, and selective memory across five centuries.This book challenges the reassuring narrative in which the profits of slavery belong safely to the past. Drawing on elite sociology and social history, it shows how wealth derived from the transatlantic slave trade — channelled through tobacco dynasties, landed endowments, and charitable institutions — continued to shape the economic, educational, and civic fabric of Bristol long after abolition. The Society’s fluctuating influence across the twentieth century, through the rise and fall of the welfare state and the revival of philanthrocapitalism after 1980, reveals how mercantile elites adapt rather than disappear.At a moment of intensifying debate over reparations, memory, and institutional accountability, this book offers an essential anatomy of how slavery’s legacies are perpetuated, obscured, and only partially confronted.Michael Tichelar is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Humanities Research Group at the University of the West of England. He was also a visiting fellow of the Regional History Centre also at UWE. He is retired from academic life and a career in local government and managing voluntary organisations. He is the author of The History of Opposition to Blood Sports in Twentieth Century England (2017), The Failure of Land Reform in Twentieth Century England (2019), Why London is Labour (2021), and Labour in the Suburbs (2023). He was a tutor organiser for the Worker’s Educational Association in Bristol before training as a psychotherapist.