Queen Anne’s Bounty was NOT invested in slave trading
A letter in the Church Times last week notes that the investment held by Queen Anne’s Bounty was NOT in the slave trading of the South Sea Company but in government debt, rather like today’s gilt stocks, held by the Company.
Impact-investment fund: questions
From Monica Cooper
Sir, — As Professor Richard Dale points out (Comment, 22 March; Letters, 5 April), the South Sea Company annuities held by Queen Anne’s Bounty were indirect investments in government debt (akin to present-day gilts), not in slave-trading.
In fact, this crucial point is explicitly made deep in the body of the Church Commissioners’ report of January 2023. This explains that the Company annuities provided “a regular income derived from interest payments received from the Treasury on government debt”. These annuities “formed far and away its [the Bounty’s] most significant investment”.
The implications of this, however, are nowhere discussed, and this fundamental fact is completely absent from the Executive Summary, which instead chooses to emphasise the Company’s shocking but, in this case, irrelevant involvement in the slave trade.
But the Commissioners most probably do understand the point, as their public statements have all avoided making any explicit claim that the Bounty invested in the slave trade, while allowing the reader to infer that it did. (Probably the sole exception is a single sentence in the body of the report, which was quoted by Professor Dale; but this was written by a third-party contributor.)
The most recent example of the Commissioners’ approach is their briefing to the General Synod in February. There they simply stated without explanation that the Bounty had “significant investment” in the South Sea Company, following this with a description of the Company’s deplorable but, in this case, irrelevant engagement with the slave trade, allowing the unsuspecting reader to make a link between the two. There was no hint that the Bounty’s investment was in government debt, via the Company.
Given this consistent framing by the Commissioners, is it possible that, when the Trustees agreed the £100-million impact-investment fund, they believed — wrongly — that the Bounty invested significantly and for the long term in the slave trade? If so, will they now review that decision?
Or will they fall back on the Commissioners’ other delicately phrased claim — that many of the individual benefactors to the Fund “were, or may have been” linked to slavery and “so to some extent their benefactions may have been” derived from this source?
And how did the Commissioners come to this nebulous but damaging conclusion? Not, it appears, by investigating individual benefactors, but by looking for generic factors that, they thought, made a benefactor’s connection to slavery more likely.
The report is rather vague on the methodology, but it seems that the factors included having naval connections, or being in the House of Lords, or being linked to certain industries, or having links to Liverpool, or to Manchester, or to Bristol, or to London (where ten per cent of the population lived). It is not surprising that many benefactors fell into one or more of these categories.
Giving away £100 million is a serious responsibility. Did the trustees pay sufficient care and attention to the evidence with which they were presented?
MONICA COOPER
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