Workhouses in England and Wales linked to transatlantic slave trade, study suggests

Report highlights how British workhouses were funded and supported by those who profited from slave economy

They were places of crushing hardship for the poorest people in Britain for centuries but a new report highlights how closely workhouses in England and Wales were linked with slavery and British imperialism.

Workhouses, perhaps best known in popular culture through the Charles Dickens story Oliver Twist, were routinely funded and administered by people involved in the slave trade, the study says.

The paper Racial Capitalism and the Workhouse–Plantation Nexus in the Atlantic World was published in Antipode.