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Free to Enslave: Politics and the Escalation of Britain's Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1688–1714
William A. Pettigrew
| ENDING Britain's transatlantic slave trade required political intervention, and histories of abolitionism traditionally privilege the movement's political aspects over its economic rationales. Explanations for the expansion of British slave trading in the Atlantic (and the origins of American slavery) concentrate, contrastingly, on the atomized economic calculations of colonists and their suppliers. Yet there remains an underappreciated political aspect to the development of Britain's slave trade. From 1690 to 1714, members of Parliament debated the slave trade in sixteen parliamentary sessions, absorbing about the same amount of legislative time as discussions of its abolition decades later. Would a joint-stock monopoly company—the Royal African Company—better satisfy the colonies' demand for slave labor and better serve the interests of the British state than an open trade in which any subject was free to trade in slaves?1 These debates, surprisingly ignored by historians, had a considerable effect on the evolution of Britain's transatlantic slave trade. Locating the escalation of the trade within its broad and rich political context shows how modern political culture and institutions were involved in the escalation as well as the later abandonment of Britain's trade in human beings. |
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In the century after 1660, the annual volume of the English slave trade increased from approximately seven thousand to more than forty thousand. Slave trade historians typically rely on war (in Europe and in West Africa), fluctuating planter purchasing power due to oscillating colonial commodity prices, and the changing availability of white indentured labor to explain the rise and fall of slave trade volumes.2 They have not appreciated how political changes allowed interests on both sides of the Atlantic to lobby to change Britain's slave-trading franchise from monopoly to open trade. The demise of the Royal African Company's monopoly had an enormous effect on the volume of Britain's transatlantic slave trade. Though the company could never entirely enforce its monopoly, its demise allowed more Englishmen to become involved in the slave trade and ship many more slaves. |
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The company's monopoly power decreased in three stages. First, in 1688, James II's flight deprived the company of its governor and its best means of enforcing its monopoly. Second, in 1698, after public deliberations throughout the 1690s, Parliament passed the Africa Trade Act, which opened the slave trade to all English citizens for a period of thirteen years on payment of a 10 percent duty on imports and exports. Independent slave traders became known as separate traders. Third, these separate traders prevented the company from gaining parliamentary recognition for its monopoly, and the 1698 act expired in 1712, opening up the slave trade to all. In 1686, during James II's reign, when the Royal African Company's monopoly came closest to being enforceable, English slavers embarked on thirty-seven voyages. By 1730 the open trade in slaves allowed slavers to conduct 120 voyages. During this period the company's market share fell from 86 percent to 1 percent.3 |
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