Brown Brothers Harriman’s slavery links exposed by Liverpool campaign | Slavery

The links between the founders of the US’s most prestigious investment bank and enslavement have come under scrutiny after a campaign by historians in Liverpool.

Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH) is Wall Street’s oldest private investment bank, known for the role alumni have played in shaping US politics and the global economic order, with former partners including Prescott Bush, patriarch of the Bush political dynasty.

The bank’s roots go back to the early 19th century, when an Irish merchant, Alexander Brown, migrated to Baltimore and moved into banking, having made a fortune in the cotton trade.

His sons spread out to New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Liverpool in the UK, establishing businesses including Brown Brothers & Co, the institution which, through a merger, would become Brown Brothers Harriman in 1931.

In an account of its history on its website titled “The Cotton Trade”, the bank had claimed “there is no known instance of slaves being owned by members of the Brown family”, who they also described as “firmly coalesced behind abolition” in the years leading up to the American civil war.

However, research by the Liverpool Black History Research Group (LBHRG), whose members include broadcaster Laurence Westgaph , revealed a different story.

“Brown Brothers Harriman is a really important bank, their story is modern capitalism as we know it and the rise of America as a superpower,” Westgaph said.

“The Brown family used money they made buying and selling slave-produced cotton to establish themselves in banking – and they started to lend money to others producing cotton.

“When these people took out mortgages on plantations, they also took out mortgages on people.

“And if the Browns’ bank foreclosed on the loan, not only did they foreclose on the land, they would foreclose on the enslaved people – so in the 19th century the Brown family ended up owning plantations and enslaved people.

“They saw themselves as opposed to slavery while perpetuating the systems that maintained it.”

Despite BBH’s statement of denial, books the company quoted as sources on its website revealed otherwise, including Sven Beckert’s 2015 book Empire of Cotton, which described how “the Browns of New York came to own at least 13 plantations” in the 1840s, “along with hundreds of slaves”, and Zachary Karabell’s Inside Money: Brown Brothers Harriman and the American Way of Power, which described how two of Alexander Brown’s sons, William and James, “had not wanted to own plantations”, but “held on” to them, hiring managers “who by definition oversaw an operation based on slave labour … until prices recovered enough for them to sell”.

After LBHRG wrote to BBH, accusing the bank of a “deliberate attempt to sanitise the historical truth”, BBH removed the claim that there were”‘no known instances” of the Brown family owning enslaved people from its website, adding to the text that plantations they acquired included “associated slave labour”.

In an email to LBHRG seen by the Guardian, a spokesperson for the bank said: “The text we published was not meant to obfuscate the direct ownership of slaves, but rather to explain the context.”

As well as being a dominant figure in transatlantic trade and banking, William Brown was the Liberal MP for South Lancashire between 1846 and 1859, funding Liverpool’s central library and museum, with the wider family’s donations including the Crosby Brown Collection of thousands of instruments from around the world at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Westgaph is now urging BBH to make a “full, open and honest” acknowledgement of its history and launch a programme of reparatory justice.

“That’s the least they can do, especially as they have this tradition of philanthropy – philanthropy built on the terrible exploitation of African people,” he added.

A spokesperson for BBH said: “Slavery is a shameful and abhorrent chapter in history. We have provided information on our website regarding our predecessor firm’s involvement in the cotton trade, which relied on enslaved labor, to be open and transparent and to explain the context we believe to be true of that time.

“Brown Brothers Harriman & Co is committed to promoting equal opportunity within the firm and to fostering an equitable and inclusive environment.”