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British corporations today confront the unenviable challenge of reckoning with the fact that much of the capital underpinning the UK’s rise to global financial prominence over the last three centuries was amassed through a network of first and second order transmission mechanisms exploiting the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its economy.

The need to undergo such a reckoning owes to recent revelations from scholarship that between the 16th and 19th century in excess of 12 million Africans were captured and sold as human property, many by British firms (including: the Crown, the Church of England, the Bank of England, RBS, Barclays, Lloyds Bank, JP Morgan as well as major insurance companies and law firms). It owes also to recent events such as Black Lives Matter and the British government’s award of £1m in funding to the Dictionary of British Slave Traders project, the unambiguous intent of which is to lay bare how today’s institutions were engaged in, and benefited from, this trade.

Such things put institutions with links to this history under mounting pressure to undergo a process of review, reporting and repair.

To delay in this task carries reputational risks likely to impact upon ESG considerations as well. Refusal to do so suggests that they regard these involvements as legitimate, as well as their long-term consequences, specifically the resultant racial inequality in UK society today.

And while most organisations adhere to the UK Modern Slavery Act, logic suggests that any true commitment to eradicating slavery also requires a backwards-looking process, acknowledging the ways firms profited from human trafficking, no matter how remote in history. Otherwise, they allow for their own participation in Slavery what they also condemn as impermissible for the modern economy.

The Corporate Legacies Project exists to assist in just this task.