The Crown and slavery: a democratic republican reading of the Guardian series |

King Charles urged to ‘take some responsibility’ for royal slavery links | King Charles III | The Guardian |

My main reservation regarding the recent Guardian ‘Crown and Slavery’ series of articles, excellent though it is in many respects, consists in its concentration on wealth of the royal family aka ‘the Firm’ and its constituent actors. In other words, the articles are approaching our archaic constitutional arrangements from an essentially anti-monarchist perspective, as opposed to a democratic republican one. What’s missing here is a recognition of the pressing need for root-and-branch reform of the atrophied Anglo-British constitutional lash-up from 1688 to 1707 Act of Union. Preoccupation with the monarch (i.e. Charles III) alone will not bring about the political change we so desperately need.

From the Glorious Revolution (1688) to the Act of Union (1707), by means of several acts of parliament, political power was transferred from the monarch to the Crown. This was the political price William and Mary paid for securing their accession to the throne. Crucially, sovereignty was not to reside with the people, a principal aim of the Civil War republican radicals. Ever since the late 17^th century, Anglo-British democracy has, in effect, resembled a hybrid liberal state promoting the comforting fiction of an ‘age of stability’, which, in reality, was a stability based on the profits of empire and slavery. 

I salute the Guardian series for the valuable research clearly in evidence, but like the misnomered group Republic, it does not draw the crucial conclusion its evidence surely demands: the need for greater democracy, best expressed by campaigning for a democratic republic.  Despite the longevity of republican ideas as a basis for organising a more just society, these ideas have remained underdeveloped. Democratic republicanism is not about exchanging a constitutional monarchy for a presidential republic. Indeed, democratic republicans would critique presidential republics, such as the USA or France, in much the same way as they do monarchies. Arguably our radical English democratic republican tradition speaks to this perspective. It’s also a tribute to the ‘success’ of the Glorious Revolutionary settlement that its persistent and pernicious influence continues to manifest itself in today’s profoundly undemocratic Britain, where many of our anachronistic institutions and ‘constitutional conventions’ still remain unreformed. 

As important as the Crown’s concealment of its many appalling crimes, some of which the Guardian series is currently rightly exposing – for example, the historical engagement with and enrichment through the slave trade, coupled with complicity in the atrocities of the empire that accompanied it – democratic republicans argue that these criminal acts were objectively facilitated by those same historic ‘constitutional arrangements’.  In other words, the crimes of the British slave trade that the Guardian has reported on, were contingent upon the creation of the British Crown, the growth of the Royal navy and, hence, the development of the African slave trade.

Re-reading the ideas of English republicans in the 1640s and 1790s, as well as those of Shelley, largely expressed in his poetry and prose of 1819, and the writings of his republican contemporaries, it is telling that 200 years later, as the Tory-led culture wars rage on, the Crown is still succeeding in convincing many educators in this country that our radical democratic traditions and rich republican history should neither be taught nor seriously discussed. Unfortunately, since the creation of the Labour Party, the left has failed to champion democratic republicanism, instead it has fallen to liberals, such as those in the group Republic, to define modern republicanism without reference to the role of the working class in the struggle for democracy.