Over the past several years, the movement to pay reparations to the descendants of enslaved Africans has gained significant momentum. In the wake of Black Lives
This guy wrote a neat paper about the role slavery and mass murder played in ensuring a specific $1 billion a year company currently exists:
At the same time as the Lace family’s role in the slave trade was being whitewashed, their wealth and social prestige continued to grow. Thanks in large part to the long and distinguished careers of Joshua and Ambrose II, the Lace legacy continued in Liverpool’s legal community across the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first. Indeed, the Lace name remained on one of the city’s largest law firms until 2014.
Meanwhile, the corporate heirs to this legacy conveniently, and predictably, continued to erase the history of slaving upon which their economic foundations rested. In 2006, on the occasion of his retirement, a senior partner of the firm Berrymans Lace Mawer reflected on the company’s past, asking, “What are our traditions?” His answer is worth quoting in full:
Laces was founded in the late 18th Century by a truly remarkable man, Joshua Lace. The Lace family, central to the thriving city of Liverpool, were seamen and merchant adventurers. Joshua became their lawyer and then built the dominant Liverpool legal practice of the 18th and 19th Century. But he worked on a broader canvas—he was not only a key figure in founding the Liverpool Law Society, but was politically active (he bravely opposed the slave trade) and supported the Arts and Sciences. We know little of him personally but his firm was professional, respected and tough. It still is.98
One might dismiss such stories as corporate boosterism. In reality, they repeat the dangerous, deceptive lies of the past. Ambrose Lace and his son William are remembered not as slavers but as “merchant adventurers.” Son Joshua is depicted as the family’s primary legal counsel as they helped build the “thriving city of Liverpool.” Finally, in the coup de grâce, Joshua is remembered as a brave abolitionist, a claim that is patently false. To be clear, this is not simply revisionist history. It is a continuation of the subterfuge executed by Ambrose Lace in the aftermath of the Calabar massacre, as well as his great-grandson Charles’s intentional misrepresentations of the massacre in the late nineteenth century, layering the deceptions and erasures across generations.
If Ambrose Lace was an “ordinary” slave trader, some apologists might characterize him as a “man of his times,” someone who simply capitalized on the legal opportunities of his day. Regardless of one’s thoughts about the past morality of the slave trade, organizing the mass execution of four hundred people was a crime that could have landed Lace in prison, even in his day. Lace clearly understood this to be the case and went out of his way to ensure the cover up, even as he parlayed the massacre into a financial empire that has spanned generations.
Fast-forward to the present day. No scholars have presented Ambrose Lace the way I have here. Thus, it stands to reason that Lace’s corporate heirs would perpetuate his original act of erasure. However, there is ample evidence in public archives, and even online, that Ambrose Lace earned his living primarily as a slave trader. So what would compel a law firm like Berrymans Lace Mawer to characterize the Lace family as “merchant adventurers”? And why would they proudly claim the family’s abolitionist legacy when the truth is actually the opposite? The answer seems fairly clear. Slavery is now widely viewed as a crime against humanity. Corporations, fearing liability, seek to erase their criminal legacies in much the same way Ambrose Lace did over 250 years ago.
In 2014, the Liverpool law firm Berrymans Lace Mawer merged with Scottish firm HBM Sayers, creating one of the largest commercial law and insurance risk companies in Great Britain. The combined firm generated more than £100 million of revenue yearly. As reported at the time of the merger, the new company’s business model hinged on the defense of corporate interests over those of vulnerable, often poor, individuals: “If an employee has an accident in work or a customer slips on a supermarket floor, and then they decide to sue for compensation, it is [the lawyers of this new firm] who will defend the corporate or its insurer.”99 The new firm’s emphasis on protecting corporations over common, working people was stunningly predictable for a business built on earnings from the slave trade.
However, the story only gets more bizarre. At precisely the moment that the Black Lives Matter movement crystallized around the police killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in the United States, this newly merged, multimillion-pound British law firm transformed the Berrymans Lace Mawer name, rebranding the new company “BLM.” Hauntingly, the words “Lace” and “Lives” are interchangeable in the BLM homonym, linking the lives of the four hundred Africans taken by Ambrose Lace at Calabar in 1767 to those of Freddie Gray, Tony Robinson, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and dozens of others who died at the hands of police violence since 2014. It is almost as if the ghosts of Lace’s victims called out across the generations, anticipating the calls of “Black lives matter” and demanding restitution from a legal system birthed in corruption.
BLM quietly continued to conduct business through the apex of the Black Lives Matters protests in 2020. Even as demonstrations spread across England, culminating in the toppling of slave trader Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol in June 2020, the law firm escaped notice. But the BLM law firm was ultimately short lived. In March 2022, BLM merged with Clyde & Co, which has offices stretching from the United States to Asia, and even Africa. Not surprisingly, the new law firm uses the Clyde & Co. name, effectively erasing the last vestiges of nearly 250 years of Lace family branding in the legal profession. Experts estimate that the combined Clyde/BLM law firm will generate annual revenue of more than £700 million.100 One would be hard pressed to find a riper target for economic reparations for slavery.
