Elihu Yale made a lot of money in the slave trade.

Yale worked as an official for the East India Company in Madras, India — present-day Chennai. Yale presided over the company’s slave trade, which Yannielli writes was “larger … than its Atlantic counterpart.” Yale served on the governing council at Fort St. George on the Madras coast and participated in buying hundreds of slaves and shipping them to the English colony on Saint Helena, an island in the South Atlantic.

Yale enforced a rule that required that the company send a minimum of 10 slaves sent on every ship bound for Europe, likely for “unloading” at Saint Helena. On two separate occasions, Yale sentenced “black Criminalls” accused of burglary to suffer whipping, branding and foreign enslavement.

What’s in a Name? The Namesake of Yale Drive