Bank of England

A national bank formed in 1694 to help the English government finance its ongoing war with France. The Bank operated a joint stock, meaning it was common for slave traders and slave owners to subscribe capital to the Bank and serve on its directorate. Through the financial services it provided to private merchants and trading companies (loans, overdrafts, bill discounting) and the sizeable loans it extended the British state, the Bank helped to facilitate the expansion of Britain’s empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including deepening its involvement with the slave trade and slavery. There is currently no evidence that the Bank as an institution ever directly participated in the slave trade, but during the 1770s and 1780s the Bank did have a financial stake in two sugar plantations and their workforce of 599 enslaved Africans in Grenada. By the mid-nineteenth century the Bank had begun to take on formal public responsibilities, such as ensuring the stability of the British financial sector by acting as a ‘lender of last resort’ in times of crisis, and in 1946 the Bank was nationalised. Today, the Bank of England is the UK’s Central Bank. [MB]

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