My ancestors profited from slavery. Here’s how I am starting to atone for that | Alex Renton

Families like mine have listened to the descendants of enslaved people. Today we launch a new lobbying group, Heirs of Slavery

How many people in Britain today have benefited from industrialised slavery in the Caribbean? A vast and many-stranded enterprise, it was responsible for 11% of British GDP at its height in 1800. Wealth and privilege seeps down the generations, and British slavery ended only 185 years ago: there must be hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Britons whose lives are touched by the money it generated.

You aren't responsible for what your ancestors did. You are responsible for what you do," says the writer on culture and racism Emma Dabiri. I examined my ancestors' involvement in a book published two years ago. Now I, and others with similar histories, have decided we should go further.

Alex Renton's Blood Legacy: Reckoning With a Family's Story of Slavery is published by Canongate. He is a co-founder of Heirs of Slavery