Washington Post: 'A crown branded onto bodies'

Important history which I share:

"A crown resembling the iconic St. Edward’s headpiece from British coronations sat atop the letters S and C, apparently a stylized reference to the slave-trading South Sea Company. The accompanying text, written in 1715, declared that this was “the Mark henceforward, to be put upon the Bodys of the Negros to be sold & Dipos’d of in the Spanish West Indies,” under a contract between Britain’s late Queen Anne and Spain’s King Philip V.
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Hot-ironing initials into the flesh of captives was a horrid but common practice in the era of the transatlantic slave trade. These brands were used to establish ownership claims, as a means of identification, for accounting purposes and to regulate sales.
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[Brooke] Newman said she will reveal evidence in her upcoming book, “The Queen’s Silence,” that some enslaved Africans were branded with “RACE” to denote the Royal African Company of England."
— "A crown branded onto bodies links British monarchy to slave trade," by Karla Adam, Washington Post, September 28, 2023

"The reference would have been to the British crown," as the article explains, although "the interlocked Cs here also could have represented the agreement between the Spanish and British crowns." Some captives were branded twice: once with the SSC mark and once with a Spanish mark.

Image: A fleuron from the book A proposal for the relief of the new proprietors in the South-Sea Company, 1721. Wikimedia Commons

Newman's book is under contract at Harper Collins. Her two previous books are on Bookshop.

If you like, you may read my recent personal essay, "Transphobia is a bellybutton mirror" (unpaywalled "friends link"). It'speaks in/directly about branding, both in the original sense of the term as a tool of enslavement and in the modern sense of a professional image. This essay is an 18-minute read on Medium.