December 2024
Many shook their heads in disbelief when the Church Commissioners’ investigation into its (the Church of England’s) involvement in transatlantic chattel enslavement made headlines in January 2023. And many were downright livid when they learned that, in response, the Church Commissioners’ board approved a £100 million seed investment in a new fund dedicated to fostering a “better, fairer future”. It also committed to using its influence to encourage others to co-invest to raise at least £1 billion.
The objections came thick and fast.
Wasn’t the Church Commissioners for England by statute required to restrict its support of the ministry and mission of the Church of England to England itself? So why reflect on the Caribbean and Africa?
And shouldn’t we consign the past to history and concentrate on the pressing issues of today? Wouldn't the £100 million be more judiciously allocated to ease the significant financial and logistical burdens faced by clergy and church volunteers who are currently operating food banks, leading youth initiatives, visiting the infirm and elderly, and delivering a myriad of services for the vulnerable?
Clearly—this was “wokeness” gone too far.
A deluge of complaint letters ensued, with a couple so extreme they were referred to the police. Some parishioners threatened to withdraw their financial contributions to their parish churches.
Media misrepresentations of the Church Commissioners’ motives and actions proliferated, and there were relentless attacks on the experts advising the Church Commissioners. A support helpline was established for Church Commissioners’ employees who felt overwhelmed by the vitriolic response.
As First Church Estates Commissioner and chair of the Assets Committee that stewards the Church Commissioners’ £10.4 billion endowment fund, I am in a good position to set the record straight.
Why this decision by the Church Commissioners?
This was not a matter of “wokeness”. Our Board concluded that as a 320-year-old in-perpetuity endowment investor, addressing transatlantic chattel enslavement was an essential, strategic action core to the purpose, values, identity, and long-term flourishing of the Church Commissioners. Above all, it was a non-negotiable act of responsible investment and risk management.
It was back in 2019 when it was first suggested to the Audit and Risk Committee that the Church Commissioners needed to explore the origins of its endowment fund and determine whether there were any links with transatlantic chattel enslavement.
There were important risk management reasons for this—and other institutions and endowment funds on both sides of the Atlantic were asking similar questions. The Audit and Risk Committee thought deeply about the issue and came to the unanimous conclusion that, yes indeed, the Church Commissioners needed to ask questions of its own.
The Church Commissioners is an independent charity that supports the mission and ministry of the Church of England in England through responsible and ethical management of our endowment fund. A key mission of the Church of England is to “transform unjust structures of society, challenge violence of every kind and pursue peace and reconciliation”.
As a leading responsible investor, the Church Commissioners is committed to supporting and promoting the flourishing of every human being and the planet.
Our future as a responsible investor depends on effective risk management. And all risk management models are, at their core, exercises in interrogating historical data sets. Investors need to understand their history in order to illuminate the complex forces at play in the present so they can make good decisions today, and decisions that are faithful to their vision and mission in the future.
The reality is that transatlantic chattel enslavement has irrevocably shaped the society, economy, and faith of modern-day England. Yet, despite its profound impact, this regrettable, brutal history remains poorly understood.
A deeper, more accurate understanding could perhaps equip us all to better navigate the challenges and risks we now face—in particular, the existential risks we face from climate change and artificial intelligence.
This understanding would almost certainly equip investors like us to support the mission and ministry of the Church of England in England more effectively.
Moreover, as a leading responsible investor, we had a duty to hold ourselves to the same high standards of fairness and justice that we expect from the companies in which we invest. We knew that our own organisation was falling short. We needed to examine ourselves and develop the understanding to be the change we wanted to see.
The Board of the Church Commissioners unanimously agreed with the Audit and Risk Committee and initiated an investigation in late 2019.
Methodology
The board did not approach this task emotionally. Challenged by the Audit and Risk Committee, they did so clinically and objectively, and ensured that it was CEO-led.
Our CEO opted for a forensic accounting approach of the kind one would adopt to determine any financial irregularity. Debits and credits can reveal profound truths, focus on hard facts, and avoid suppositions. A team of specialist accountants from an independent auditor, Grant Thornton, and historians with deep expertise in this history meticulously examined our archives. The team employed detailed transaction analysis, account reconstruction, and asset tracing—a monumental task involving approximately 12,000 transactions spanning 150 years.
Findings
Unsurprisingly for a 320-year-old fund, we did indeed find links to transatlantic chattel enslavement. The Church Commissioners’ predecessor fund, Queen Anne’s Bounty, was a scheme established during Queen Anne’s reign in 1704 with the moral purpose of tackling the most extreme examples of poverty among the clergy of the Church of England.
In the early decades following its establishment, it invested significant sums in the South Sea Company, one of the most dominant players in transatlantic chattel enslavement during the early eighteenth century. Queen Anne’s Bounty accumulated investments in SSC annuities estimated to be equivalent to hundreds of millions of pounds sterling today.
Additionally, it received numerous financial benefactions from individuals linked to transatlantic chattel enslavement.
Early insights that shaped our response
Our journey yielded enough revelations to fill a volume of respectable length. However, three key insights emerged early on which enabled us to reflect deeply and strategically on a response that was substantive rather than merely performative, as so many racial justice initiatives have been in the past.
We did not want to respond in ways that just played to “the optics” of only benefiting a relative few (possibly already well-heeled) Black people and white people again, as has been previously so often the case. We wanted an outcome that helped to heal, repair, and do justice for all who have been made vulnerable today by the legacies of transatlantic chattel enslavement.
We were encouraged to think deeply about how our organisation, given our myriad statutory, fiduciary, and practical constraints, could exercise influence at institutional and systemic levels so that the benefits could be widespread.
As responsible investors, we recognised that transatlantic chattel enslavement was at its core a profoundly immoral act of capital allocation. It involved labelling men and women as commodities—inputs into an industrial process. This labelling of certain human beings as subhuman led to the deliberate choice to torture, traumatise, and destroy millions of souls. As the Archbishop of Canterbury aptly stated, “The abomination of transatlantic chattel enslavement was, and has always been, blasphemy.”
Our response as responsible investors needed to encourage our business and investment community to act on the understanding that every human being on the planet was created in God’s image and is worthy of being treated with compassion, dignity, and respect.
We needed to encourage capital to “do good”.
Secondly, we recognised that the mindsets, ideologies, and justifying of false narratives—the toxic legacies of transatlantic chattel enslavement—continue to influence our county, our world, and our church to this day. They are embraced by many of all backgrounds, colours, and ethnicities around the world, including in the Caribbean. Across the globe, we continue to commodify and exploit human beings, prioritise profit over people, and inflict widespread human misery so that a relative few can profit and flourish.
Our response must include a strong focus on education to intentionally address these toxic mindsets, ideologies, and false narratives.
Thirdly, no amount of money can compensate for the immense human suffering caused by transatlantic chattel enslavement. We cannot change the past. But we need to be intentional about learning from the past to address the immense challenges we face in the present. We must not run the risk of taking our eyes off the very significant threats we face today that could erode and destroy the descendants of transatlantic chattel enslavement every bit as much as such enslavement did.
Complexity
We recognised also that we cannot and must not treat this centuries-old history as less complex than it actually is. Solutions need to be substantive rather than performative and must not ultimately benefit just a relatively few Black people. This has happened all too often in the past.
The complexity stems from the fact that transatlantic chattel enslavement took place in the context of a wider exploitation and destruction on a truly global scale. Some call this “colonial capitalism”. It bequeathed toxic mindsets, value systems, and behaviours to the descendants of oppressors and the oppressed alike. This makes addressing the legacies of this history in substantive ways uniquely challenging.
Dr Jack Davy in his book We, The Oppressors notes that once colonial capitalism encountered those people, it warped their ways of life, sparking/setting off a scramble for wealth and power that destroyed entire cultures.
How does one begin to address these toxic legacies that have become so entrenched?
The Independent Oversight Group appointed to make recommendations on how we addressed our report findings touched on this issue when commenting about our work:
We have never properly questioned the capitalist systems that colonialism benefited from and later imposed on the descendants of enslaved Africans and other communities. New interventions must address the power imbalances inherent in extractive economic systems. Otherwise, they will fail. (para 2.12)
These are big considerations. How could we, given the myriad statutory, fiduciary, and practical constraints of our own organisation, influence change in the right direction?
Our response
Our considered response was to commit to investing £100 million in a new in-perpetuity fund to facilitate further research, investment for good, and grant-making—a strategic and catalytic investment of seed capital in encouraging capital to help create the better, fairer future we want to see. Our hope is that other corporates, institutions, and responsible investors co-invest so that collectively we raise £1 billion.
We consulted widely in the Caribbean, Ghana, and in the UK. We then appointed an independent oversight group of 14 members through a blind CV process to advise on how best to deploy the £100 million funding. As it so happened, four of that group were either Barbadian or of Barbadian heritage. This Oversight Group suggested that the fund should be called The Fund for Healing, Repair, and Justice, and made 41 recommendations. These recommendations are helping to shape the Fund’s investment and grant-making criteria.
In July 2024, the Archbishop of Canterbury issued a heartfelt apology for the Church’s involvement in transatlantic chattel slavery in his sermon in Jamaica’s National Arena at the service for the 200th anniversary of the Diocese of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands.
Impact
The £100 million which we are able to commit, given our very particular statutory, fiduciary, and practical constraints, is of course a mere drop (albeit an important drop) in the ocean.
What is far more significant is the influence we can exercise. Ours is one of the largest endowment funds in the United Kingdom—and a highly respected one, which won the Environmental Finance 2023 Impact Award for Endowment/Foundation of the Year. We are uniquely well positioned to seek to convene other actors in the investment community, and to encourage capital to do good.
We have been engaging widely.
Other investors, many non-faith-based, have been approaching us quietly, wanting to learn from our journey. They realise that it is one many among us will have to go through. In December 2024 the City of London Corporation announced that it is about to commence such an investigation of their links to enslavement. The Bank of England has also completed such an exercise within recent times. There is an inevitability that corporations and institutions must face their past.
Through wider engagement by ourselves and our archbishops in particular, we have seen a new desire for dialogue, understanding, healing, and reconciliation coming out of Barbados, Jamaica, Tanzania, and Ghana. We see this coming out of the Catholic Church, the Jesuits in America, and other religious bodies that have approached us wanting to learn from us.
At a grassroots level, our work has inspired innovative Community Theology Thursdays for leading theologians, clergy, and congregants of global majority heritage to explore the theological implications of our work as well as other issues. One of the objectives of these Community Theology Thursdays is to encourage more persons of global majority heritage to pursue advanced studies in theology.
Finally, we have become more intentional within our own organisation, and can truly say we are now an example of the change we hope to see more widely in our business and investment community.
It is noteworthy that even in 2019, when 26 of the 27 members of the Church Commissioners’ Board were white, and the senior executive leadership was all white, there was unanimous approval of this investigation and strong support of this journey by all despite the considerable pushback and hostility. I very much doubt this would have been the case ten years ago.
It speaks to remarkable progress.
The Church Commissioners now has a First Church Estates Commissioner of African heritage, the first time that has been the case since the post was created in 1850, approximately 20% of the Board is of African heritage, 20% of the Assets Committee is of African heritage, and 40% of our Securities Group that makes capital allocation decisions is of African heritage.
These changes did not take place through any racial justice initiative as such; they took place through the Board genuinely seeking excellence and casting its net more widely and intentionally in pursuit of professional excellence and experience in its composition. It enables better, more informed, and expert decision-making.
Learning from transatlantic chattel enslavement in an age of climate change and artificial intelligence
We have learned two lessons from our journey, which will improve our due diligence processes and the quality of our investment decisions going forward.
- We have learned to ask better questions.
What was striking about transatlantic chattel enslavement was the way in which much of the British public was kept ignorant by obfuscations, justifying false narratives, and pseudoscience dished out by a range of actors, including corporates, museums, universities and, of course, the Church.
The disinformation and misinformation we all complain about today is by no means new. We have learned to ask better questions to unearth how we may now be kept aware in our age of artificial intelligence and climate change so that the rich and powerful can’t avoid transparency or accountability.
Academics and civil society are sounding the alarm. Too many of us are unaware of how the economy and the architecture of artificial intelligence are constructed. How many know that it is in reality built and powered by a vast army of human labour in the Global South—particularly Africa—doing the mind-numbing drudge work of labelling data and monitoring content in inhumane conditions for hours on end? All for a relative pittance to maximise the profits of a handful of trillion-dollar tech companies.
And too many of us are unaware of the widespread use of bossware, algorithmic surveillance that forces workers to work longer and harder in ways many consider inhumane—not only in the Global South, but also in the West.
The AI-Big Tech complex that is increasingly dominating our lives runs the risk of echoing colonial exploitation. We run the risk of devaluing human capacity and agency, and eroding lives and livelihoods in ways that mirror the past.
The same is true of climate change. Dr Keiron Niles at the University of the West Indies in a 2023 article entitled “Climate Change and Transatlantic Slavery: Uncomfortable Parallels, Uncertain Futures” outlines six ways in which our current climate situation mirrors the injustices observed in transatlantic chattel enslavement: tragedy of the Commons; energy transition; lack of representation; disproportionate distribution of benefits and costs; loss of culture and identity; and compensation—injustices all.
- We have learned to “follow the money”.
Our CEO’s decision to open our 300-year-old ledgers to forensic accountants Grant Thornton to determine the nature and extent of our involvement with transatlantic chattel enslavement was groundbreaking, world-leading—and highly revealing.
Debits and credits can reveal truth more accurately than words. Or, to quote again the Archbishop of Canterbury, they are “theology in numbers”.
We will henceforth scrutinise debits, credits, and market disclosures far more intentionally. They will tell us more than the words or actions of seeming benevolence by fossil fuel companies or the AI and Big Tech industry.
Our vision for the £100 million fund
Setting up a fund of this nature is unprecedented and will be difficult and complex, especially for the Church Commissioners, which is constrained by very particular statutory, fiduciary, and practical considerations. We are determined to focus on effectiveness, to be substantive and not performative, and take our time, if necessary, even as we seek to be urgent and intentional.
As of the time of writing, the Church Commissioners is still waiting for the Charity Commission of England and Wales to fully consider and approve the set-up of the fund.
In parallel, we are learning as much as we can, consulting with a range of distinct financial and investment experts across the Caribbean, UK, US, and EU to ensure that we build a fund that is best in class. We are answering several questions that we are being posed.
One vision is that by 2034, 200 years after the enactment of the Slavery Abolition Act, the Church Commissioners will have in place a fully operational, profitable Fund for Healing, Justice and Repair: a catalytic ecosystem of investment, returns, and capital allocation which in some measure repairs and heals individuals and communities made vulnerable by the legacies of transatlantic chattel enslavement.
The fund would meet the highest responsible investor standards with rigorous and disciplined risk management. There would be effective collaboration across all key stakeholders and communities in a transparent and intentional manner. We would engage external, independent, expert scrutiny to ensure the fund is at all times faithful to its core purpose, and substantive and not performative in the outcomes we seek.
We would continually be asking the question, “How do we ensure that in one hundred years’ time, we have not created new harm, and we are not complicit with the seeding or perpetuation of the profit-before-people mindsets, ideologies and justifying false narratives that underpinned transatlantic chattel enslavement?”
The journey ahead
James Baldwin once said, “Not everything we face can be changed but nothing can change until it is first faced.” What if our institutions, our corporations, and our churches faced rather than obscured this history a long time ago? What if they had long recognised and repudiated the mindset and values that underpinned the enslavement of others—the widespread commodification and exploitation of human lives so a relative few could profit? Would we still be struggling with these toxic legacies of transatlantic chattel enslavement to the same extent today? Would we be better positioned to manage the existential crises we face through climate change and artificial intelligence?
We hope many with historical links to transatlantic chattel enslavement face and learn from this history now. Each institution’s journey, responsibility, and response will be different, but by learning together and working together we can accelerate change in significant ways, despite the pushback and backlash we see out there.
The journey ahead will be difficult, complex, and inevitably imperfect.
But necessary.