The Global Shame of Slavery: How a British Queen Nearly Escaped Historic Blame for the Slave Trade

When you think of slavery in America, what comes to mind?

Maybe you think of greedy, profiteering Southern plantation owners and shameful forced imprisonment, inhuman living conditions and torturous labor. Perhaps you remember watching the groundbreaking TV mini-series Roots, where actor Levar Burton played the strong willed, young slave Kunte Kinte being savagely whipped by his American overseers.

What of slavery and the British Monarch Queen Elizabeth I?

In author Nick Hazelwood's book, "The Queen's Slave Trader: John Hawkyns, Elizabeth, and the Trafficking in Human Souls" history can hopefully be properly balanced, as we learn that slavery was an incredibly complex undertaking with economic foundations and origins not on American soil, but actually in Europe and specifically in Queen Elizabeth I's Britain.

Nick Hazelwood has a degree in history and is a freelance journalist and writer living in Madrid, Spain. With a journalist's meticulous research method and an exhaustively probing mind, Hazelwood carefully traces the slave trade to Queen Elizabeth, who wished to preserve the Renaissance like atmosphere of her reign by exploiting the slave trade and directly sending out Captain John Hawkyns to get slaves by any means necessary. The Queen knew her country's weak economy couldn't support the artistic pursuits she enjoyed and wished to see continue and the slave trade apparently was an irresistible, open market investment.

Queen Elizabeth's reign is usually referred to as the Elizabethan era or the Golden Age of Elizabeth. She took after her father Henry VIII in the arts, being a writer and poet herself and none other than the bard himself William Shakespeare wrote and came of age during her reign. By all reports she ruled Britain as a fair and decisive monarch, whose favorite motto was the Latin: Video Et Taceo or I see and keep silent. With Hazelwood's historic expose, it certainly seems she lived by this motto quite well and for so long that history has kept silent about her participation in the slave trade.