As the Caribbean Community Reparations Commission launches its most powerful manifesto yet for reparatory justice, a groundbreaking new book by American historian Brooke N Newman has provided the evidentiary foundation that Caribbean advocates have long sought — direct, documented proof that the British Crown did not merely permit Jamaica’s enslavement. It designed it, financed it, and profited from it for nearly three centuries.

Newman, an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, spent years tracing the monarchy’s links to the Transatlantic Slave Trade through colonial archives, state records, slave-trading company papers, and the Royal Archives themselves.

Her book, The Crown’s Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery in the Americas, published in January, has ignited a global conversation about royal accountability — and its timing could not be more consequential for Jamaica.