Governor Stirling and the British slave trade

'Western Australia's founding governor James Stirling came from a Glaswegian family made enormously wealthy through British slavery.

Stirling's rise to captain in the Britain's Royal Navy in Jamaica was predicated on this wealth and standing. It was as a captain that Stirling petitioned the Colonial Office to set up a new colony in Australia's western third. 

Stirling's two grandfathers and four great-grandfathers all made serious money from the trade in slave-produced goods and some through enslavement itself. 

Stirling's father traded textiles with the slave-owners of Jamaica. To give a sense of the scale of his wealth: in one year he lost the equivalent of £7 million yet continued trading'.

SOURCE: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-12-15/lachlan-macquarie-was-slave-owner-time-to-update-history-books/100573218