How enslavement became state-backed operation supported by Conservative and Lib Dem forerunners

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Tory and Whig MPs were central to funding trafficking of enslaved people and many opposed abolition of the slave tradeThere is a British culture of celebrating the abolition of slavery without acknowledging that the country enslaved and trafficked millions of African people for centuries.The newly published Register of British Slave Traders, which documents the thousands of investors in Britain’s near 250-year trafficking of more than 3 million enslaved African people, shows that it was a state-