slave trade

slave trade. The slave trade of Great Britain, and those of other European countries, transformed the indigenous African and surpassed the Muslim trades. Britain's became the largest national trade. About 75,000 Africans were carried in British ships in the 17th cent.; in 1701–1800 the numbers were about 2.5 million out of the 6.13 million slaves exported, reflecting the expanding demand from the British plantations, especially the sugar colonies, as well as exports to Spanish America. Between 1701 and 1810 British North America received about 348,000 slaves, the British Caribbean about 1.4 million.

The English trade after 1600 was first conducted by monopolistic chartered companies, of which the Guinea Company (1618) lasted until the 1650s. The Royal Adventurers into Africa (1660, 1663) was succeeded by the Royal Africa Company (1672–1752). However, private traders were always active, even before the company's quasi-monopoly was ended in 1698, and numerous merchant partnerships were involved. The royal family's patronage of trading and colonizing companies in the 17th cent., particularly the duke of York's, and the granting of parliamentary subsidies for the maintenance of African forts and trading posts in the next, mirrored the involvement, if not the direct participation, of all classes of British society. Slaves were traded for an increasing number of English commodities, so that by the early 18th cent. groups as diverse as Devon textile producers and iron manufacturers from the Birmingham area sought to influence legislation. The trade was viewed as a pillar of the plantations and necessary to economic and commercial expansion. Lawyers, legislators, and churchmen viewed it as morally and theologically justifiable. The quakers were unusual in their early attacks on it as contrary to Christian equality and compassion.

The slave trade has given rise to a vast historical literature. Topics examined include: the regions of west Africa from which the slaves were brought—the major regions for the European trade as a whole were roughly west central Africa (2 million), Bight of Benin (1.2 million), Bight of Biafra (814,000), Gold Coast (677,000), Sierra Leone (483,000), and Senegambia (210,000)—how these changed over time and the extent to which preferences for Africans from one or another region could affect the market; the organization of the trade on the African coast; the nature of slave voyages, the size of ships, the treatment of slaves, and their mortality rates; the sex and age ratios of the slaves taken from Africa; the volume of the trade; its impact on African societies. Econometric analyses have been complemented by studies examining the growing unease over the cruelties of the trade, part of the change in sensibilities, expressed in the literature of benevolence and sentimentalism, that found expression in the writings of, for example, William Cowper, Samuel Johnson, and the Wesleys. Other studies have looked sympathetically at the black population of 18th-cent. England and have documented the lives of individual Africans.

The trade was critical to the production of major colonial commodities, especially sugar, tobacco, and rice, whose export helped shape the global market economy of the late 17th and 18th cents. as well as sectors of the British economy. Its importance for certain British ports is well known. Liverpool's dominance is clear and Liverpudlians were in the forefront of opposition to reform. Figures for 1750–76 suggest 1,868 ships sailed from there to Africa, 588 from Bristol, and about 260 from London. However, while profits from the trade in some periods may have run at about 9 per cent, arguments that it provided important investment capital, contributing to the British industrial revolution, are now discounted. See anti-slavery.

Richard C. Simmons