British ships ferried over 3 million enslaved African people across the Atlantic Ocean. Lloyd's of London insured many of those vessels, the people chained below deck sometimes categorized as “perishable goods”, alongside cattle, by the market's underwriters.

Lloyd's involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade is not included in the market's permanent exhibition at its modernistic City tower but that is set to change.

"The legacy of slavery is racism. You can't do what you have to do to make slavery work unless you constitute the enslaved people as less than human," said Nick Draper, a former JPMorgan banker who was founding director of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery (LBS) at University College London

"We did it on the basis of ethnicity, race and skin colour. It's embedded in British and European culture – that's what we are working through now."

British ships ferried over 3 million enslaved African people across the Atlantic Ocean. Lloyd's of London insured many of those vessels, the people chained below deck sometimes categorized as “perishable goods”, alongside cattle, by the market's underwriters.

Along with other financial institutions in London, the insurance market has been forced to confront its racist past following last year's Black Lives Matter protests.

Lloyd's and the Bank of England have each hired a historian to delve into their roles in the slave trade and are planning on publicizing the results in the next year.

The exhibitions will shine a light on the fortunes coined off a barbarous system and the role played by some of the City’s most venerable grandees in keeping it afloat, including people such as John Julius Angerstein, known as ‘the father of Lloyd's'.

The 18th-century industry titan was chairman of the market when a large chunk of its business was based on the slave trade and Lloyd's says there is evidence to suggest he was a trustee of estates in the Caribbean that held enslaved people.