More than 1,000 women invested in companies at heart of Britain’s slave trade
Several 18th-century paintings depict affluent white women with young enslaved servants, who often wore a single pearl earring. Composite: Guardian/Palesa MonarengView image in fullscreenSeveral 18th-century paintings depict affluent white women with young enslaved servants, who often wore a single pearl earring. Some investors, unable to write their names, signed company records with a spidery “X”.The research identifies 1,100 female investors across the histories of the RAC, the South Sea Company, and other separate ventures, though the true number is likely to have been higher.
- ▪Several 18th-century paintings depict affluent white women with young enslaved servants, who often wore a single pearl earring.
- ▪Composite: Guardian/Palesa MonarengView image in fullscreenSeveral 18th-century paintings depict affluent white women with young enslaved servants, who often wore a single pearl earring.
- ▪Some investors, unable to write their names, signed company records with a spidery “X”.The research identifies 1,100 female investors across the histories of the RAC, the South Sea Company, and other separate ventures, though the true numbe
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| Original publisher | The Guardian — UK |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/ng-interactive/2026/sep/15/more-than-1000-women-invested-britain-slave-trade |
| Publication time | Tue, 15 Sep 2026 11:00:41 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-15T11:11:56.648Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-15T11:11:56.648Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | EMS5OpSv7nh8 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Several 18th-century paintings depict affluent white women with young enslaved servants, who often wore a single pearl earring. Composite: Guardian/Palesa MonarengView image in fullscreenSeveral 18th-century paintings depict affluent white women with young enslaved servants, who often wore a single pearl earring. Composite: Guardian/Palesa MonarengEnslaving nationSlaveryMore than 1,000 women invested in companies at heart of Britain’s slave tradeWomen used profits from trafficking of enslaved Africans to secure their families’ futures, research revealsAamna MohdinTue 15 Sep 2026 07.00 EDTShare@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff2)…
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