Tomas Guy and the South Sea Company

If only there were the odd historian on the BLM side. Clearly, David Olusoga doesn’t count:

Thomas Guy

A founder of Guy’s hospital in south London, he made his fortune through owning a large number of shares in the South Sea Company, whose main purpose was to sell slaves to the Spanish colonies.

A statue to Guy stands by the hospital and is owned by the hospital’s charitable arm. Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS trust ruled out any renaming but said it would discuss the sculpture’s future as part of Khan’s review, adding: “We recognise and understand the anger felt by the black community, and are fully committed to playing our part in ending racism, discrimination and inequality.”

That might best be done by telling them to stop being twats:

Investment in the South Sea Company
By the late 1670s, Guy had begun purchasing seamen’s pay-tickets at a large discount, as well as making large loans to landowners. In 1711, these tickets, part of the short-term ‘floating’ national debt, were converted into shares of the South Sea Company in a debt-for-equity swap. The South Sea Company was a government-debt holding company, and while there was a brief attempt to sell slaves in Spanish America, this was completely unprofitable in Guy’s lifetime.[3] Therefore, while he is sometimes erroneously portrayed as having profited from slavery,[4] this is incorrect. In 1720, the year when the South Sea Bubble burst, he sold 54,040 stock for £234,428, making a profit of about £175,000.[5] He then re-invested this money in £179,566 4% government annuities, £8,000 of 5% government annuities, and £1,500 East India Company shares.[6]

Thew South Sea Company did indeed pursue, own, the assiento. It also never even exploited it fully, let alone made any money out of it.

39 thoughts on “Tomas Guy and the South Sea Company”

  1. Bloke in North Dorset

    But if they had made a profit he would have been richer, therefore bad man for even trying.

    Lets face it, there’s no historical figure pure and virtuous enough to survive today’s moral grandstanding and just scrap the lot, no questions asked.

  2. “.. In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”

    The timing was out by a couple of decades, but where’s the lie?

    Clearly the establishment agrees with the rioters objectives, which is the humiliation and demoralisation of white people – particularly the English.

    We should be asking ourselves why.

  3. They’re not going to stop being twats, though, are they? Not when they are meeting no resistance.

    ‘Being twats’ is a winning strategy for them….

  4. As a relatively successful Black Briton with family who came from Barbados I sometimes wonder if in the end I might have profited from the slave trade myself.

  5. This vicious hysteria has severe overtones of the Nuremberg Race Laws, where jack-booted socialists investigated to see of any of your grand-parents were Jews.

  6. I suggest we create a new TV programme where, each week, a prominent twat is nominated to appear in the stocks to be pelted with offal by members of the public.

    Who is a prominent twat?

    Cressida Dick, Sadiq Khan, any member of the Parliamentary Labour Party, all TV presenters, Ian Hislop, all people who write for the Guardian, Michel Barnier, that spotty dog off the Woodentops, Simon Rattle…..

  7. A point I have been known to make. Absolutely everyone in Barbados – and, obviously, the UK – is better off than near everyone in Ghana, Benin, etcetc. That is not to say that slaves were better off being slaves but their descendants are. There’s thus not that much of an argument for reparations.

  8. Quite. The facts are indisputable. In the US the slaves were the victims but their descendants are huge beneficiaries. Not just for being born in a rich, free country – for which blessing alone half the people in the world would happily trade places with them – but also for the trillions of dollars spent on anti-poverty initiatives since 1964, and which will disproportionately have been spent on Blacks.

    Factor those trillions into the reparation discussions and, who knows, perhaps with Trump and his Art of the Deal they’ll actually find themselves paying out to Whitey?

  9. “We recognise and understand the anger felt by the black community”

    No you don’t. You are spouting orthodoxy. And stop with the collectivization. We in the West recognize individual rights, not group rights.


    Translation: “We hope the alligator eats us last.”

    The West has already taken massive action on this. This is ’60s rhetoric. It is prima facie evidence that the Left doesn’t care about any of this, it is just a tool to get people to accept the destruction of Western Civilization.

    Talk of racism, discrimination and inequality expresses the belief that problems for BAMEs are someone else’s fault. Encouraging personality disorder. Medical professionals spouting this is despicable and cowardly.

  10. The list keeps growing. How much would you pay to throw chitterlings at the Pope, Justin Welby, Philip Pullman, that emeritus cockwomble Richard J Evans, every oncologist with a Twatter account..?


    Comapare and contrast:

    Number of African slaves taken to North America between 1620 and 1865 ~ 400,000*

    Number of their descendants in the USA today ~ 38,000,000

    Number of European slaves taken by North African muslims ~ 1,250,000**

    Number of their descendants in North Africa today ~ 0



  12. It is a mistake to think they are acting in good faith, that they are interested in facts, or that they can be reasoned with. They cannot. It’s like facing paneers with a tennis racket – wrong sport and completely ineffective.

    How can you reason with people who are beyond reason, who do not even recognise it? Who deploy one argument one minute and its exact opposite a minute afterwards? Whose main arguments are shouting and intimidation?

  13. “If only there were the odd historian …”

    Their goal is to erase history, just as ISIS did when they destroyed ancient monuments. By destroying history, they remove other groups’ claims to power.

  14. @ Andrew M
    I strongly disagree – these are people for whom “1984” is an instruction manual: they do not wish to merely erase history but to rewrite it.
    The South Sea Company was formed with the purpose of consolidating and managing Government Debt including that owned by Thomas Guy who had already made his fortune. It was called the South Seas company and did in fact export general goods, most notably cloth, from Britain to South America but it was awarded the “Asiento” – from which it made losses – by the government to sucker investors into buying stock in the unreasonable expectation of making monopoly profits by supplying fewer slaves than the Spanish & Portuguese colonists wanted.

  15. i bet none of the race hustlers would object if they had an accident or had an illness that could only be treated at Guys.I’m fed up of seeing black people who are doing well/top of their profession moaning about racism.

  16. Jonathan’s post at 10:28 needs repeating frequently – perhaps I’ll make a Tee-shirt or banner. Now, which colours would be appropriate: black lettering on a white background, or vice versa?

  17. Jefferson Davis and General Lee are the easy ones. What are they proposing for slave owner George Washington?

  18. You can’t leave out the multi-untalented Ant and Dec, though you may have to build smaller stocks, and a shade to stop the reflection from the balding one’s forehead blinding the throwers.

  19. I’m fed up of seeing black people who are doing well/top of their profession moaning about racism.

    I think that you will find that most of them aren’t. The shouters and screamers are mostly rich little white kids. What we have here is a minority group that is making a disproportionate amount of noise and getting away with it because businesses (Yorkshire Tea, I’m looking at you) and local councils are peopled with craven cowards. Down in Poole, the council stopped being twats because ordinary people resisted and like cowards everywhere, the council backed down.

  20. David Olusoga, clearly another black token who gets to lecture his betters in the name of diversity.



    The end result of these people is that they will produce more racists than the Hitler youth.

  21. Oh and Connolley;

    “piece-a-minute brigade.”

    Almost as quick as you editing Wikipedia articles before you were banned.

    Now piss off back to repairing radios & failing to get elected as a green councillor.

  22. Hadrian’s wall surely on borrowed time. Hadrian surely owned slaves and likely believed the Angles and Scots were separate peoples or races for practical purposes and separation was a better plan than integration.

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