John Locke’s Royal African Company and Bahamas Adventurer Slave Stock

“So little is known of the separate traders,” lamented the historian of the Royal African Company, K. G. Davies, that he was reduced to perceptive speculation about their activity. The authority, Basil Williams, writing about the period 1714–1760, asserted, “The traffic in negro slaves was carried on mainly by the Royal African Company.…“ In actuality a great deal can be discovered about the separate traders and their activity. The papers of Humphry Morice provide a rich source for a merchant who was perhaps London's and Great Britain's foremost slave trader in the 1720s. The assertion that the traffic in Negro slaves was carried on mainly by the Royal African Company is easily refuted by materials in the Public Record Office. London separate traders dominated the trade for the first three decades of the eighteenth century giving way to Bristol traders in the 1730s, who in turn gave way to Liverpool ascendancy in the 1740s.The English slave trade between 1699 and 1729, energized by the end of monopoly and the booming international market for slaves in America, grew prodigiously. In these years England accounted for nearly one-half of all slaves exported from the west coast of Africa. London alone accounted for two-thirds of all slaves delivered by English ships.Although the period falls half a century and more before the classic exposition of the advantages of free trade over monopoly by Adam Smith, an English free trade doctrine had found expression in Sir Dudley North's pamphlet, Discourses upon Trade (1691), and parlimentary proceedings. Interlopers in the slave trade, smugglers in the lucrative Spanish-American trade who opposed parliamentary restriction on their activity, separate traders whose participation in the trade became legalized in 1698, and a variety of commercial, industrial, and planting interests all contributed in their fashion to an outlook favoring free trade in slaves.

The British Government and the Slave Trade:Early Parliamentary Enquiries, 1713-83 Christopher L. Brown In what ways did parliament influence the British slave trade during the eighteenth century? How did the politics of the Atlantic slave trade figure in parliamentary politics in the years when the British seized the largest share of the international traffic in African labour? In the present state of research, such questions remain surprisingly difficult to answer for most of the eighteenth century, in between the prolonged controversies that shaped the slave trade in its early years and at its close. The British slave trade became the subject of sustained controversy twice in its history, as most scholars long have known. In the first instance, in the quarter-century after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the central questions concerned the organization of the trade to Africa. Who would have the right to participate in the slave trade and under what terms? Did the Royal African Company, which had enjoyed a monopoly in the Africa trade, best serve the interests of the nation and the state?1 In the second, more famous instance, between 1788 and 1806, the opponents of the slave trade and its defenders contended over its fate.2 That preoccupation with the Africa trade, both in its early years and during its last, contrasts markedly with the state of public and official debate in the intervening decades. From 1713 to 1787, when the British slave trade reached its apex, the traffic in African captives only rarely became the subject of sustained discussion in parliament. For this reason, perhaps, the political history of the British slave trade for most of the eighteenth century remains almost wholly unknown. Instead, when studying these years, scholars justifiably emphasize how the slave trade worked - who participated, how it was organized and financed, where it was conducted, and with what consequences for Africa, Africans, and the colonial societies in the Americas. The place of parliament - and the British imperial state more generally - in the development [End Page 27] of the Atlantic slave trade receives only the most cursory acknowledgment. So we are left in the odd position of knowing that the British slave trade mattered to the emerging wealth and power of the British empire, but not how, or even if, it mattered to the governing élite. This is, in part, the fault of how the politics of the slave system, and commercial and imperial questions more generally, tend to be treated by historians of eighteenth-century Britain. Practices like the slave trade, it sometimes is assumed, have a political history only when they become embroiled in political controversies. And so the measure of their political importance is often judged by the intensity of public debate and the time and effort devoted to a topic in parliament. In this conception, political history takes place when political change occurs, or the prospects for political change appear. Political stability, the absence of debate or political controversy, by contrast, marks the terminal point of political history, or alternatively the space from which to track the emergence of new political controversies, but only rarely itself becomes the subject of historical analysis. Yet, political stability should interest us as much as political change, not only for what it reveals about earlier and later political controversies, but also because political stability, too, results from political processes. The forces, conditions, and interests that sustain a set of practices, the circumstances that prevent a subject from becoming controversial, should also become the subject of political history. What accounts, then, for the lack of public and official interest in the Africa trade during the middle decades of the eighteenth century? On the rare occasion that the British slave trade did draw comment, what were the context and the content of these concerns? An answer to these two questions may further elucidate the peculiar place of the Atlantic slave trade in eighteenth-century British culture, as well as in Hanoverian politics. For the apparent tension between the importance of the slave trade to the empire and the limited official interest in its operation would seem to mirror a larger ambivalence about what the Africa trade meant to the nation...

This is a book heavily researched in British official parliamentary and state archives which seeks to make a major intervention in ongoing scholarly and public discourses on the history and memorialisation of slavery. William Pettigrew seeks to show that, far from being distinct from the practices and justifications of the slave trade, ideologies of freedom associated with the enlightenment and the expansion of free trade were not only deeply connected to the slave trade, but in fact stoked its rapid expansion in the eighteenth century. Thus, ‘in helping to expand slavery, freedom has incurred a debt’ (p. 218). Pettigrew’s argument is, on its own terms, judicious. His book is based on an analysis of the triumphant lobbying of ‘separate traders’ for the deregulation of the transatlantic slave trade, and the consequent collapse of the Royal African Company (RAC) after the passing of a statute ensuring total deregulation of the trade in 1712. Pettigrew reveals the detailed strategies of the separate traders to ensure the defeat of the RAC. Portraying their victory as part of the spoils of the Glorious Revolution and the growing power accruing to Parliament after 1689, Pettigrew shows how the ‘separate traders’ expertly deployed the new political settlement to their advantage. Where the RAC directors had expertise of previous joint-stock companies such as the East India Company and the Levant Company, and sought to defend this model, the ‘separate traders’ were, by and large, people experienced in the Atlantic trade: they were planters who wanted direct access to Africa’s labour pool and saw the greatest profits as available through a large expansion of deregulated trade, lobbying the English provinces cleverly to advance their interests.

This paper presents evidence of the interrelationships that existed between the Royal Society in its early years, the slave colonies, and the West African slave trade, first under the auspices of the Royal Adventurers, and later the Royal African Company (RAC). First, it examines the extent of the overlapping of memberships between the bodies. Second, it chronicles the Society's ownership of shares in the RAC. Third, it investigates involvement by Fellows of the Society in the administration of the (then) slave colony of Jamaica. Finally, it presents a few relevant extracts from the Society's foreign correspondence from outposts of the rising empire, and also extracts from discussions at ordinary meetings concerning the cause of the differences in colour between Europeans and Africans. Following the sale of its shares in the RAC in 1699, no further investments in the slave trade by the Society are known to have occurred.

Review: <i>Cabotajes Novohispanos: Espacios y contactos marítimos en torno a la Nueva España</i>, by Guadalupe Pinzón Ríos

Kenneth Morgan, series ed. Robin Law, David Ryden, and John Oldfield, vol. eds. The British Transatlantic Slave Trade. 4 vols. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003. 1632 pp. Endnotes. Index. 4 vols. £360/$540. Cloth. For historians of Africa interested in the impact of the Atlantic slave trade there is already a considerable body of primary material available in most major libraries. Besides the many travelers' accounts republished by Frank Cass in the 1960s, we have the invaluable four-volume edition prepared by Elizabeth Donnan seventy years ago, which includes a large number of archival documents in addition to extracts from contemporary books. More recently, Robin Law has published the first two volumes of what eventually will become a four-volume edition of the local correspondence of the Royal African Company's agents on the coast of West Africa in the late seventeenth century. This new publication makes a welcome addition to the existing literature. The texts are on the whole well chosen and representative. Altogether the original texts-facsimiles of contemporary publications-cover about fourteen hundred pages. They are supplemented in each volume by a lengthy introduction and shorter subintroductions to the individual documents (150 pages), endnotes (80 pages) and a thirty-page index to the whole set. Appropriately, the series begins with Africa itself. Volume 1, focusing upon the operation of the slave trade in Africa, is edited by Robin Law, whose introduction gives us an excellent review of recent literature. Most historians of Africa working on this period will have come across the four texts selected here. John Hawkins constitutes an exceptional case both with regard to the early date (1569) and because he deals with the direct participation of Europeans in the enslaving process. John Matthews's Voyage to the River Sierra-Leone (1788) struck me as a surprising choice, given that this book, nearly two hundred pages long, was reprinted as recently as 1966, albeit without annotation. John Adams's Sketches (1821), based on voyages made between 1786 and 1800, covers most of the West African coast. Law's annotation is helpful here, as it is for the excerpt from Gomer Williams's account of the Liverpool slave trade (1897), comprising papers on Old Calabar in the years 1767 to 1783. The remaining three volumes are more concerned with debates conducted in Europe, but they too contain material that is of significance for African history. Volume 2, on the Royal African Company, edited by Kenneth Morgan, comprises six texts written during the period extending from 1680, when the company first felt obliged to defend its special position (emphasizing, among other things, the benefits of the slave trade to England), to 1746, by which time the company, although retaining its forts in West Africa, had long ceased to supply slaves to America on its own ships. …

This article reviews scholarship on the transatlantic slave trade. The foundations of a slave trade historiography date to the late eighteenth-century abolition movements in North America, Britain, and France. Before then, occasional voices sounded in protest. The Dominican friar Tomás de Mercado, for example, published in 1569 an anti-slave trade tract based on his observations of slave sales in Seville and of the institution of slavery in Mexico. From 1698 to 1714, 198 pamphlets concerning the Royal African Company's monopoly were published in England. With the founding of the world's first antislavery crusade, antislavery advocates came to predominate among the researchers who were seeking information on the slave trade. Abolitionist energies coalesced in 1787–9 in London with the formation of anti-slave trade committees and the subsequent British parliamentary inquiries. In this three-year period at least twenty-five British, American, and French authors wrote about the slave trade, a total that would not be reached again until the 1970s, when academics organized the first major conferences on Atlantic slaving.

On 4 June 1677, the Morning Star, a ship belonging to the Royal African Company, moored at Port Royal, Jamaica. This chapter analyses the records of a major supplier of slaves, the Royal African Company, in Jamaica, between 1674 and 1708, years in which Jamaica moved from extensive smallholding to a plantation monoculture economy. The Royal African Company detailed the purchases of all purchasers who bought slaves on credit for them and some who bought slaves for cash. The Royal African Company slave sales’ invoices are remarkably complete and seemingly accurate in listing purchasers’ names, slaves bought, the prices paid and the gender and age of slaves sold. Large purchasers were more likely than the average slave buyer to be active in the slave market so long as they were alive. The willingness of certain Port Royal purchasers to buy unwanted slaves was directly related to the third peculiarity of Port Royal purchasers.

ECONOMIC historians concerned with the supply of labour to the New World colonies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have long taken an interest in the operation of the transatlantic slave trade. African slaves were of major importance to the economy of colonial America, and their central role makes a knowledge of the conditions of their supply and the factors that determined those conditions critical to an understanding of the economic history of the regions that depended on them. This article will present some new evidence bearing on the economics of the trade to the English West Indies between i673 and I 724, and briefly consider the implications of these data for an understanding of the functioning of the slave trade in the period. The new evidence comes from one of the most important single known sources for the study of the slave trade, the surviving invoice account books of the Royal African Company.2 While these books have long been known to historians, and have served as a principal source for a classic study of the Royal African Company,3 they are a rich source, and still contain much unexploited material. What follows is only a first step towards a systematic presentation of some of the quantitative information the invoices contain. Tables I-3 present a set of price series which consist of the mean prices paid for adult men and women slaves in Barbados, Jamaica, and Nevis, combining quotations from all recorded auctions in a given colony in each year.4 In addition to the prices, the tables show the number of observations-i.e. the number of slaves sold-on which each annual mean is based. The relative completeness of each series roughly reflects the volume of shipments by the Royal African Company to the three colonies.5

The records of trading between Africans and Europeans on the Guinea Coast since antiquity raise issues the practical resolution of which has never ceased to occupy economic historians. The Herodotean inadequacies of dumb barter in Carthaginian goods and in gold dust were fully resolved only at the time of the eighteenth-century slave trade. In Senegambia and even on the Windward Coast, as we now know, the Royal African Company had still to go without an effective profit-and-loss accountancy. With the advent of the regular slave trade two new commercial devices had to be introduced by the Europeans. Both the ‘sorting’ and the ‘ounce trade’ sprang from the vital need for adjustment between the radically different trading methods of Europeans and Africans. And it was not so much a case of mutual adjustment, for of the two systems only one, the European, adjusted.

Royal African Company Share Prices during the South Sea Bubble

Bonding and the Agency Problem: Evidence from the Royal African Company, 1672-1691

Evidence drawn from records of auctions held by the Royal African Company in Barbados between 1673 and 1723 is used to obtain annual estimates of slave prices by demographic category. These price series are then used to investigate the implications of an economic analysis of the demographic composition of the slave trade. The results provide quantitative support for the prediction that rising slave prices in the West Indies caused an increase in the share of children among the population of slaves in the transatlantic trade. This economic effect may have been a significant link between American slave markets and the demographic history of black populations in both Africa and America.

Given the high mortality rates aboard slave ships, the Middle Passage was known as a “voyage of death.” Disease and death, sickness and mortality, profoundly characterized the lives of Africans during the Atlantic crossing. This essay examines the subjective experience of dispossession, focusing in particular on a psychosomatic disease that was thought to be endemic to Africans forcibly migrated from home: “fixed melancholy.” Drawing on tracts on nautical medicine, slave ship captains’ journals, and evidence generated by the Parliamentary Committee’s testimonies, I argue that “fixed melancholy” is best understood as a form of nostalgia, an affective attempt at return that is simultaneously a symptom of the emotional distress produced by dislocation and a mechanism for slaves to resist their conditions of servitude. Via a brief reading of the opening chapters of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, I also show how nostalgia—or the memory of place—continued to exert a residual influence on the emancipatory imagination in black diaspora.

This chapter begins with a statement of the importance of the slave trade to Britain. This is seen as residing in the provision of enslaved labourers to maintain the plantation system in Britain's New World colonies, thereby providing 'an inexhaustible Fund of Wealth and Naval Power to this Nation'. The slave trade is of considerable national advantage to Britain. The chapter provides the importance of the African trade to Britain's prosperity by emphasising the need to maintain the forts, factories and castles belonging to the Royal African Company. A detailed summary of individual forts and establishments is presented to make a case for a parliamentary allowance to support the Royal African Company in Africa. The subsidies, bounties and exemptions from duties that the French and Dutch have in place to support their trade with Africa are estimated in order to buttress the case for financial assistance for the company.