George Hibbert was an English merchant, politician and ship-owner. Alongside fellow slaver Robert Milligan, he was also one of the principals of the West India Dock Company which instigated the construction of the West India Docks on London's Isle of Dogs in 1800. An amateur botanist and book-collector, he also helped found the Royal National Lifeboat Institution in 1824.

Robert Milligan was a Scottish merchant, ship-owner and slave trader who was the driving force behind the construction and initial statutory sectoral monopoly of the West India Docks in London. From 1768 to 1779 Milligan was a merchant in Kingston, Jamaica. He left Jamaica in 1779 to establish himself in London, where he got married and had a family of eight children. He moved to Hampstead shortly before he died in 1809. By the time of his death, one of Milligan's partnerships had interests in estates in Jamaica which owned 526 slaves in their sugar plantations.