He inherited a large fortune derived from the Atlantic slave trade and the sugar industry in the Caribbean, later becoming one of London's leading merchants and shipowners.
[2] In 1829 Greene went to Saint Kitts to look after his father's cotton and sugar plantations (acquired in 1823), which were worked by slaves and were highly profitable.
Through his wife's family connections, Greene formed a partnership with James and Henry Blyth, who controlled much of the external trade and sugar production of Mauritius, in 1846.
[8] When the ownership of slaves was finally abolished in the British Empire in 1833, the government paid compensation for slavery - not to the enslaved people, but to the slaveholders.
The government paid £20m, 40% of the HM Treasury's annual spending budget (£17 billion in today's terms) in compensation.
In June 2020, during the global protests following the murder of George Floyd, the Bank of England issued a public apology for the involvement of Greene, amongst of some of its past governors and directors in the slave trade.