Thumbing through the tanned pages of centuries-old records in the basement of the British Library, Nicholas Radburn came across an illustration that took him aback.
A crown resembling the iconic St Edward’s headpiece from British coronations sat atop the letters S and C, apparently a stylised reference to the slave-trading South Sea Company. The accompanying text, written in 1715, declared that this was “the Mark henceforward, to be put upon the Bodys of the Negros to be sold & Dipos’d of in the Spanish West Indies”, under a contract between Britain’s late Queen Anne and Spain’s King Philip V.
“It was striking,” said
