Royal African Company and the slave economy
The Royal African Company
The Royal African Company (RAC) was chartered in 1672 under the patronage of the Duke of York (later James II). It held a royal monopoly on English trade with West Africa, including the trade in enslaved Africans. Between 1672 and 1713 the RAC transported an estimated 100,000 enslaved Africans to the Caribbean and North American colonies. Prominent investors included Edward Colston, the Bristol merchant whose involvement in the RAC made his fortune and later became the subject of public debate about how slave traders should be memorialised.
In 1698, Parliament passed the Ten Per Cent Act, breaking the RAC’s monopoly. Any English merchant could now trade in enslaved Africans by paying a 10% duty on goods exported to Africa. This “open trade” decision had catastrophic consequences: the number of enslaved Africans transported by British ships increased dramatically. Between 1700 and 1730, British ships transported an estimated 470,000 enslaved Africans across the Atlantic — by far the largest such trade of any nation.
The Royal African Company (1672) held the monopoly on English enslaved-person trading until 1698. The Ten Per Cent Act broke the monopoly. British ships then transported an estimated 470,000 enslaved Africans between 1700 and 1730 — nearly five times the RAC’s own total across its whole period of trading.
The Treaty of Utrecht and the Asiento
The Treaty of Utrecht (1713) ended the War of the Spanish Succession and awarded Britain the Asiento — the exclusive contract to supply enslaved Africans to the Spanish American colonies for 30 years. The Asiento was contracted to the South Sea Company, a newly formed joint-stock company. It was enormously prestigious and profitable in theory; in practice the trade proved difficult. The Asiento demonstrates that the slave trade was embedded at the highest levels of British diplomacy and state finance — it was not a peripheral activity but a central prize of international warfare.
The South Sea Bubble was one of the first recorded stock-market crashes. The South Sea Company had taken on part of the national debt in 1711, issuing shares in exchange. Speculation drove the share price from £100 to over £1,000 by mid-1720. When the bubble burst, thousands of investors were ruined. Robert Walpole, who had warned against the speculation, became First Lord of the Treasury in the aftermath and managed the financial rescue — cementing his political dominance for the next two decades. The crisis exposed the dangers of unregulated financial speculation tied to the slave trade.
The Middle Passage and Human Cost
The Middle Passage was the sea crossing from West Africa to the Americas. Enslaved Africans were packed into ships in conditions of extreme overcrowding. Mortality rates on British slave ships in this period ranged from roughly 10% to 25% per voyage, though conditions varied. Disease (particularly dysentery, smallpox and scurvy), dehydration, and deliberate violence killed enormous numbers. Those who survived faced chattel slavery in the Caribbean sugar plantations or American tobacco and rice plantations — conditions of permanent, heritable enslavement with no legal protections.
Key dates: 1672 — RAC chartered; 1698 — monopoly broken (Ten Per Cent Act); 1713 — Treaty of Utrecht, Britain wins the Asiento; 1720 — South Sea Bubble. These events form the arc of Britain’s rise to dominance of the Atlantic slave trade.
The economic importance of the Caribbean colonies to Britain was immense. Sugar from Barbados, Jamaica and other islands generated profits that flowed back to Britain, enriching merchants in Bristol, Liverpool and London. By the early eighteenth century, sugar had become a staple food rather than a luxury. The entire plantation economy rested on the labour of enslaved Africans — the colonies were economically unviable without them. Bristol and Liverpool built civic infrastructure — churches, guildhalls, libraries — partly funded by slave trade profits. The interdependence of British domestic prosperity and colonial slave labour was not accidental or incidental: it was structural.
Enslaved Africans: Experience and Resistance
The experience of enslaved Africans was one of total dispossession. Those who survived the Middle Passage arrived in a world where they had no legal personhood — they were property. On Caribbean sugar plantations, work was brutally demanding: the cutting season ran for most of the year, and conditions of overwork and disease meant that life expectancy was short. Plantation owners relied on continuous importation of newly enslaved people to replace those who died. This demographic reality underlines the human scale of the Atlantic slave trade: it was not a one-time event but a continuous system of violence and death.
Enslaved Africans were not passive victims. Resistance took multiple forms: individual acts of sabotage, slowing work pace, preserving African cultural practices, and larger-scale rebellions. In Barbados, a major plot was uncovered in 1692. In Jamaica, Maroon communities of formerly enslaved people who had escaped into the mountains maintained their freedom and eventually forced the colonial authorities into treaties. The existence of this resistance matters for historical understanding: it shows that enslaved people never accepted the moral legitimacy of their enslavement, even when they could not escape it.