Newman, an American, doesn’t seem to understand that, after 1688, the monarch was superseded by the government in making decisions about trade and tax.  What the royals did have was an appetite for sugar, the direct product of slave labour.

Take a look at portraits of monarchs and members of the royal family over the years – James I’s wife, Anne of Denmark; Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria; William III, George III’s Queen Charlotte and George IV – and there in the shadows is a black page. They are now brought forward by historian Brooke N. Newman as evidence for the prosecution: the British monarchy was  intimately and financially engaged with the transatlantic slave trade.

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