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.
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.
A British shipping company that became the largest in the world at the height of empire continued to use enslaved labour after the abolition of slavery, research has found.
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.
Slavery in the British empire was abolished in 1833 but RMSPC continued to use enslaved labourers on St Thomas, its main “coaling hub”.
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