UK shipping firm used enslaved workers in Caribbean after abolition, study finds

A British shipping company that became the largest in the world at the height of empire continued to use the labour of enslaved people after the abolition of slavery, research has found.

The Royal Mail Steam Packet Company (RMSPC), which received a royal charter from Queen Victoria in 1839, used enslaved workers on the tiny island of St Thomas, which was a Danish colony at the time and is now part of the British Virgin Islands.

Slavery in the British empire was abolished in 1833 but RMSPC continued to use enslaved labourers on St Thomas, its main “coaling hub”. The labourers had to use dangerous gangplanks to unload Welsh coal imported on the island.

The Postal Museum commissioned the research, which was supported by Dr Anyaa Anim-Addo, an academic adviser, and it is part of a new exhibition about the postal industry’s connections with the slavery economy.

Joanna Espin, a senior curator at the museum, said the research showed how the global postal service and its connected companies were “a tool of empire” rather than just a communication source.

She said: “By ‘steaming’ its ships outside the British empire where slavery hadn’t been abolished, the RMSPC was able to exploit slave labour on the island. It is a complex story but we’re trying to show the choices made by the business and the way that the company benefited by exploiting enslaved labour.”

The exhibition features postcards, letters, paintings and clothing from the era, alongside correspondence between UK plantation owners and Caribbean managers discovered in the museum’s archives.

Letters from two enslaved women who secured freedom through manumission and protested against working conditions also feature in the exhibition, which is called Voices of Resistance: Slavery and Post in the Caribbean and opens in April.

The exhibition has been created with Dollar fo’ Dollar, a St Thomas-based organisation, which researches and raises awareness of the island’s coal workers.

Ayesha Morris, of Dollar fo’ Dollar, said her organisation wanted to “spread awareness of the memories of those who, basket by basket, fuelled steamships coming into the St Thomas harbour for about a century, who courageously fought for better wages and working conditions”.

RMSPC, which was founded in Liverpool, was one of the most significant British companies of the Victorian era. It collapsed after what one writer called one of “the greatest frauds in history”.

At the company’s 1920 annual general meeting, its leadership boasted that RMSPC was “carrying ocean trades in practically all parts of the world”, and a few years later the company’s ships carried 1.4 million passengers, transported nearly 14m tonnes of cargo and employed more than 35,000 people on its vessels.

But by 1929 the company was in serious trouble caused by overexpansion, while manipulation of the accounts by its chair, Lord Kylsant, hid the issue. The company’s stock collapsed in February 1931 and it was taken over by the government, leaving shareholders with nothing.

In 2023 the Guardian launched the Legacies of Enslavement programme and the award-winning Cotton Capital series, which explored its founders’ connections to the slavery economy.

The Bank of England, the insurer Lloyd’s, the royal palaces, the National Trust, Kew Gardens, the Church of England and the University of Cambridge have all launched inquiries into their own slavery connections.

The Postal Museum said it was not planning any reparations as part of the project.