The Structure of European Slave Trading

Public history sites – both virtual and physical – as well as much of the scholarly literature continue to misrepresent the evolution and structure of the Atlantic slave trades. Just as few have recognized the importance of the Americas as the organizational base of the traffic, even fewer are prepared to recognize the significance of the overall dominance of the Iberians in Atlantic slavery. Mainstream views of the centrality of the Dutch, the British, and the French to Atlantic slavery are misplaced. Such views continue to project Iberia as pioneering the mass forced migration of Africans to the Americas, but also see the northwest Europeans as overtaking the Iberians and perfecting the business. Accordingly, with their invasion of Brazil in 1630, the Dutch quickly assumed the role of chief supplier of Africans to the vast Spanish Empire, followed by the English. Further, from 1640 the English presided over their own rapidly expanding Caribbean sugar complex that within two decades was purportedly sending more sugar to Europe than the whole of Brazil. When the French joined in, they grew sugar in the western half of Hispaniola even before the Spanish ceded them what became the colony of St. Domingue in 1697. Within a little more than half a century St. Domingue was generating more plantation produce than the whole British Caribbean. These northwestern European nations had the richest slave plantation colonies sustaining a coerced population exodus of 5.3 million people from Africa, which they organized between 1640 and 1807. At the top of this system of exploitation, was “a small, high and mighty Atlantic ruling class of merchants, planters, and political leaders.”Footnote ¹ Such a dramatic pattern enabled the rapid growth of the West.

Most of this mainstream interpretation of Atlantic slavery and more specifically the Atlantic slave trades that supported it, is incorrect. In short, an interpretation that has emerged from half a century of data collection embodied in www.slavevoyages.org suggests rather that slavery and the slave trade in the Atlantic world were dominated by the Iberian nations, and it was the prior economic growth of northern Europe (and its offshoots in the Americas) that allowed the nations of that region to temporarily break into an already well-established Atlantic system. That system was over a century old when the Dutch intruded. It is true that for eighty years, down to the dissolution of the union between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns, the share of the slave trade based in Europe as opposed to the Americas declined steadily, but as late as 1640 the Iberian peninsula was the source of 80 percent of transatlantic slaving voyages. Of all the European maritime powers expanding into the transoceanic world, the Iberians had the advantage of being firstcomers – the Spanish in the Americas, and the Portuguese in Africa – advantages that the Iberians enjoyed almost to the ending of Atlantic slave trading.Footnote ²

Iberian domination of the Americas lasted well beyond the breakup of the Iberian union in 1640. When the most powerful state in Europe first came to the Americas, it did not choose to settle lightly populated Patagonia, Roanoke Island, or the St. Lawrence River. Instead, it went straight to the most heavily populated (and therefore resource-rich) central Americas and quickly took over the two most powerful Indigenous polities in the Americas (the Aztec and Inca empires). From this point until at least 1800 Spanish America was the largest, richest, most heavily populated, as well as the most urbanized European imperial domain in the New World, stretching eventually from California to Cape Horn. As we have seen in Chapter 2, the Spanish maintained their economic preeminence among Europeans occupying the Americas down to the end of the colonial era. It is not surprising that until 1760 (and probably beyond) they also attracted far more immigrants from Europe to their American possessions, on a cumulative basis, than did the British, French, and the Dutch combined. More important in the present context, during the slave trade era the Spanish introduced more African slaves into their territories than the English did to the whole of the British Caribbean, though they did so under foreign flags. Moreover, after allowing for the intra-American traffic, and including the traffic to Brazil, no less than 63.3 percent of the people carried off from Africa were held in slavery in the Spanish and Portuguese Americas. Histories of the Atlantic world have never recognized these basic facts.Footnote ³

As the first European nation with the transoceanic skills that carried them from Ceuta in North Africa in 1415 and to Japan in 1543, the Portuguese found themselves in a parallel position to the Spanish on the African coast.Footnote ⁴ No European power at the time could hope to conquer an Old-World sub-continent, especially a well-populated West Africa, but they were able to select the African regions with the combination of offshore islands and hinterlands amenable to modest military interventions and interactions with a range of African cultures. By the early seventeenth century, the Portuguese had occupied islands off the West African coast stretching from Arguim in the north to Luanda in the south and including the ten Cape Verde islands, Ile Principe, São Tomé plus the fort of Elmina. These they easily retained after 1650 in the face of northern European incursion with the single exception of Elmina.Footnote ⁵ The success of this system was perhaps due less to the occupation of island bases than to the interactions between Portuguese and Africans. These were of a kind that other Europeans were unable to replicate to quite the same extent. For many years the Gulf of Guinea islands (Príncipé and São Tomé) were controlled from Luanda rather than Lisbon. The links between these island bases and the mainland sources of captives, as well as the Upper Guinea coast, were established and maintained by lançados or tangomãos,(usually Portuguese men who married African women) grumetes (Portuguese-speaking Africans), and pombeiros (in Angola, traders of mixed Portuguese and African heritage). Many were integrated into African communities, and some were women.Footnote ⁶ The Portuguese thus developed a method for obtaining slaves in sub-Saharan Africa that ensured steady supplies at lower shipping costs and with little interference from European competitors, issues that are discussed more fully below. The northern powers were left with virtually no bases in Africa that extended beyond the range of a cannon-shot fired from one of their coastal forts, and with fewer intermediaries between themselves and the African traders who supplied the captives. Even these forts were largely confined to the Gold Coast.

Iberian domination of Atlantic slavery evolved naturally from slavery in the Iberian peninsula. Although enslavement as a practice had seriously diminished in northwestern Europe, the Baltic Crusades generated new supplies of enslaved people from the late twelfth century. Yet thereafter what looks like a major shift in values occurred. In the mid fourteenth century bubonic plague killed up to half the population of Europe and greatly increased the land-labor ratio. As we have seen in the Americas, these were conditions conducive to more slavery, not less. As might be expected, real wages began to rise, at least in England and the Netherlands from the late 1370s, surpassing previous peaks.Footnote ⁷ But in striking contrast to the second serfdom of early modern Eastern Europe, slavery and serfdom declined rather than expanded. As serfdom and slavery declined, wage labor increased and even in Sweden, where slavery endured longest, the practice went into decline. Nevertheless, juxtaposing the violence within Europe in the centuries between 1500 and 1815 and the explosive growth in Europe’s ability to move people across oceans, it is astonishing that not a single European forcibly dispatched overseas carried the heritable status of an enslaved person. Slavery frequently waxed and waned in global history, and physical resistance and abolitionist sentiments never accounted for its decline. In post-Black Death Europe slavery did not re-emerge even though its preconditions – labor shortages and high land-to-labor ratios – were clearly in evidence.Footnote ⁸

We cannot solve this puzzle in part because historians have paid far more attention to the decline of serfdom than to the disappearance of slavery. Clearly, the institution of slavery remained thoroughly familiar to Europeans even as it declined. Europeans were held captive in North Africa, and utopian thinkers from Thomas More to the radical Levelers had asserted that the idle in society – those who refused to work – should be made “common servauntes [ie slaves] of the commonwealth” a principle that the English Parliament briefly incorporated into statute law in 1547. In France, Louis X’s oft-cited 1315 ordinance did not in fact free all slaves in his domain; the French free-soil tradition emerged much later. The Spanish may have made the enslavement of native Americans illegal but both sides in the well-known Vallodolid debates between de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550–51 agreed on the essential morality of forcibly moving Africans to the Americas. As did the Portuguese when more than a century later they followed the Spanish lead. Moreover, debates on liberties in England drew heavily on conceptions of their opposites – villeinage and slavery. Awareness of chattel bondage remained ever present in late medieval Europe and continued seamlessly into the early modern era. But the issue in all discussions was who should be eligible for enslavement, not whether enslavement should exist.Footnote ⁹

Europe was defined as much by the Mediterranean as the northern seas. Western Europeans may have given up enslaving each other, and were themselves liable to enslavement in North Africa, but neither pattern of behavior had any anti-slavery implications. The border between Islam and Christendom ensured that while slavery and the slave trade had diminished somewhat in Europe, there was no break in continuity. European expansion to the Americas began in the “Mediterranean Atlantic” or “Atlantic Triangle,” an area defined by the Atlantic Islands and the Southwestern European and North African coastlines.Footnote ¹⁰ Just as the first several thousand slaves introduced to Cuba were Indigenous Americans from the mainland,Footnote ¹¹ so the very first captives brought into Portugal via the Atlantic Ocean were the now extinct Guanches, the Indigenous people of the Canaries. This happened in the early 1420s and was followed by the Moors, more precisely “blackamoors,” or Berber peoples from as early as 1441. After 1450 the traffic drew on sub-Saharan peoples with the first mainland embarkations occurring at Arguim. Iberia saw the Black component of its slave population gradually rise over the fifteenth century, but slaves and slaveholders alike still came from a strikingly diverse range of backgrounds, including Orthodox Christians, Slavs, and Muslims. Spanish authorities strove to keep the Americas Catholic, but the enslaved component of settlement in the early Spanish Americas reflected some of this diversity so that not all the enslaved were African.Footnote ¹² As eastern sources of slaves dried up with the Ottoman conquests, Portuguese access to markets in Africa became critical to the needs of Iberia’s slave owners. By the time ships began carrying the enslaved direct from Africa to the Americas in 1519 the traffic in the Mediterranean Atlantic was drawing overwhelmingly on sub-Saharan Africa. Numbers carried off to Europe approached 5,000 a year by the second half of the 1510s.Footnote ¹³

Portuguese expansion southward and Spanish invasion of the Americas meant that Lisbon, Seville, and to a lesser extent Cadiz became the organizational centers of the slave trade for a century and a half. The first arrivals had disembarked in Lagos in the Algarve close to sugar-growing regions, but Lisbon became the dominant market for incoming Africans well before 1500. Here, from 1486, the Casa dos Esclavos (Slave House) processed all arrivals and collected a one-twentieth duty. It was the institution in Portugal that came closest to the better-known Spanish Casa de la Contractión (House of Trade) in Seville that licensed all slave voyages to the Spanish Americas. Spain and Portugal attempted tight regulation of the slave trade but before the eighteenth century neither created state-owned joint-stock slave trade companies. Between 1511 and 1640 the slave trade based in Europe was synonymous with the slave trade based in southwestern Iberia. Approximately 2,000 “European” slave ships sailed to Africa from a 250-mile stretch of the coastline between Lisbon and Cadiz. They obtained their captives almost exclusively in the islands-based Portuguese system on the West African coast. In 1519 the Santa Catalina (ID 42996) mentioned in Chapter 2 sailed into San Juan, Puerto Rico, from Guinea with just eight captives. All previous transatlantic slave voyages had carried Africans from Europe, not Africa. A further half-dozen voyages direct from Africa were completed by 1526.

A breakdown of departures within Iberia shows that for every slave voyage leaving Lisbon, two left from Seville (including Sanlúcar de Barrameda) or Cadiz, but a vessel leaving Lisbon could have subsequently called at Seville and might be identified in the record as starting its voyage there.

Table 3.1 draws on new voyage data collected by Marc Eagle and David Wheat that revises estimates of the early trade published in 2015. The table allows us for the first time to assess the importance of the early Iberian traffic relative to other better-known branches of the slave trade, including those based in London and the Netherlands. For all three regions in the table, we have a count of the first 130 years of slave-trading activity beginning in 1511 for the Iberians, 1641 for London and 1650 for the Netherlands. The numbers for southwest Iberia and London are similar in this initial period. But while the traffic from Spain and Portugal continued for more than two centuries beyond 1640, London’s traffic lasted for just an additional four decades beyond the initial period, and there was little Dutch slaving after 1780. Column 3 of the table indicates that down to the end of the Union of the Portuguese and Spanish crowns in 1640, the Iberian trade was almost double the size of the total trade based in the Netherlands and larger than the London traffic when that trade was at its height. More intense exploitation of the silver mines in the Americas, and Brazilian sugar plantations gradually replacing Indigenous labor with African meant that the pre-1640 Iberian traffic accelerated quickly to levels that would not have been out of place in the eighteenth century. After allowing for the intra-American traffic, Portuguese and Spanish possessions in the Americas formed the major market for enslaved Africans until the late seventeenth century.

Between the mid seventeenth and the mid nineteenth century, Iberian-based voyages declined dramatically, for reasons explained in Chapter 2. Overall, records exist for 556 slave voyages leaving Lisbon in the two centuries between 1641 and 1842, but over half of these traded in the North Atlantic gyre that crossed the Atlantic from ports on the southern rivers of Senegambia (mainly Bissau and Cacheu) to Amazonia. Others – fewer than two hundred – made the triangular trip from Lisbon to Angola, Brazil, and back to Portugal.Footnote ¹⁴ The nineteenth century saw a minor revival of the Iberian traffic despite (or, given Spain’s tolerant attitude to slavers, maybe because of) the traffic becoming illegal. We have records of 110 of these nineteenth-century voyages that were illegal in the sense that they sailed in contravention of treaties that Spain and Portugal had signed with the British. Cadiz, Barcelona, Lisbon, and Santander were home ports for 90 percent of these ventures. Two steam ships based in Cadiz carried off 3,600 Africans to slavery in Cuba in just three voyages in the 1860s. The sleek lines of one of these, the Cicerón, is shown in Figure 3.1, a far cry from a fifteenth-century carrack, and a testament to the impact of modernity on a business that many scholars and general readers alike view as quintessentially premodern.

Figure 3.1 Profile of the steam-powered slave ship Cicerón.

Source: BNA, FO84/1218, f. 320 (IDs 5052 and 4988). Reproduced with permission of the British National Archives, Kew.

The northwest Europeans were slow to loosen the Iberian grip on slaving in the Atlantic world. Initially, French merchants traded mainly on the River Senegal and the English on the Gambia River and Sierra Leone regions. For the English, French, and after 1600, the Dutch, there were two kinds of contact with Atlantic sub-Saharan Africa. One was trade in African produce – hides, ivory, and some gold; the other, activated only in wartime, was in the enslaved that privateers had captured from Iberian slave ships after they had left Africa for the Americas. There is no hard evidence of an English, French, or Dutch slave ship between 1589 and 1630 sailing to Africa, exchanging that cargo for captives, and selling the enslaved either in the Americas or Europe. Dutch privateers in charge of a captured Spanish and Portuguese slave vessel and in one instance even freed the onboard enslaved on the Brazilian coast because they could not find a market for their human cargo. At present we have records of just twenty-nine transatlantic slaving voyages setting out from Dutch, French, and English ports prior to 1640, compared to 1,819 such ventures that set out from Iberian ports (or bases in the Spanish-occupied Canary Islands) in the same period. Beyond the Atlantic, and well before their invasion of Brazil, the Dutch had established outposts in maritime Asia that had significant slave populations. Early V.O.C. (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, 1602–1795) settlements were bases for the shipping of thousands of slaves from the Coromandel Coast and Bengal to Batavia – even in the absence of a full plantation economy.Footnote ¹⁵ This despite contemporary Dutch writers linking slavery in the Americas and indeed their own situation in Europe with the oppressive weight of the Spanish yoke.

The northwest Europeans started with no bases in Africa, no expertise in slave trading, and after the Dutch withdrawal from Brazil, very little in the way of tropical and sub-tropical territory in the Americas – no more than a precarious grip on a few tiny islands in the eastern Caribbean and some settlements on the South American coastal mainland. Yet within a quarter-century the center of gravity of the European-based traffic shifted dramatically north to first the Netherlands and England, and there, with the additional and slightly later development of the large French and the much smaller Scandinavian slave trades, it remained until 1807. Despite the nearly 500 slave voyages leaving French ports between 1813 and 1830, the traffic was thereafter firmly anchored in the Americas. The transmission of expertise in these matters from southern to northern European slave traders was made possible not by northern Italian city-states, as we might have expected given the latter’s dominance in the Mediterranean Atlantic. Rather, the Dutch and English learned from each other, especially from the chastening Dutch defeats in Angola and Brazil.

After absorbing the higher costs incurred by trading from a ship rather than a land-based trading factory, the northwest European intrusion supplemented rather than replaced the preexisting Portuguese system. The Dutch did contrive a small overlap with the Portuguese system via a 1661 treaty that provided limited access to the Angolan coast in exchange for Portuguese access to the “Dutch” sections of the Gold and Slave coasts. But 576 transatlantic slave voyages between 1641 and 1665 show the Portuguese dominating Angola, the Bight of Benin, and Upper Guinea. Moreover, despite French and English encroachments in Upper Guinea, 93 percent of Africans leaving Cacheu and Bissau over the course of the slave trade era were on Portuguese vessels, and some of the remainder were on English ships with a license to carry enslaved children to Lisbon.Footnote ¹⁶ In striking contrast to the East Indies, where many Portuguese outposts were taken by the Dutch and English, the Portuguese held on to their Atlantic system. The northwest Europeans, including the occasional Scandinavian voyage, were forced into initially secondary markets located in the Bight of Biafra and from there south to the Congo River and eventually Côte d’Ivoire and the Gold Coast to the west. Except for the Dutch capture of Elmina – not a major source of slaves initially – the northwest Europeans left the Portuguese enclaves on the coast of Africa untouched, including shared access to Ouidah in the Bight of Benin. As already noted, the combined traffic of English, Dutch, French, and Scandinavian slave traders accounted for a minority of all arrivals of Africans in America.

Two key factors enabled the northwestern intrusion into what for a century and a half had been an almost exclusively Iberian domain. The first was the economic growth of Britain and the Netherlands relative to Portugal and Spain. Growth meant the emergence of more efficient financial intermediaries, with new credit instruments evolving such as bottomry bonds, and risk-reducing insurance contracts. These innovations constituted new ways of linking ultimate lenders to ultimate borrowers and emerged from the broader financial environment as the economy grew. The slaving business drew heavily on these, as did all long-distance trade. Of course, these innovations were refined by the slave traders and other transoceanic merchants. But they did not develop first in the slave trade before being applied to the rest of the economy, as Joseph Inikori argues.Footnote ¹⁷ The second factor is the simple correlation between free and coerced transatlantic migration. Willingness of the population of the imperial power to migrate to the tropical Americas was a key determinant of the size of the African slave trade to any given region on the western side of the Atlantic. Plantations could not thrive without slaves, but without enough Europeans to supervise and initially to labor on the estates, they would never have started. In the early modern era, greater proclivity to migrate from Europe meant a greater slave trade from Africa.Footnote ¹⁸ Dutch migration was greatest in the first half of the seventeenth century, given Dutch incursions into Brazil and Dutch Guiana even though many of the European immigrants were not Dutch.

Many historians think that heritability of status and the term of servitude count for little; that the differences between slave and servant status were trivial. From this standpoint there were “many middle passages” across the oceans of the early modern world, and the experiences and specifically the transportation and use of indentured servants, slaves, and convicts on plantations was identical.Footnote ¹⁹ For such scholars a capitalist drive for profits in the mid seventeenth century created many kinds of “slaveries,” the difference between them obscured by an obsession with the racialized plantation system that did not fully evolve until the eighteenth-century Americas. French engagés (indentured servants) were “mainly” kidnapped or defrauded into service in this rendition of history and they were in reality enslaved. The term “indentured servant” was essentially just “a rhetorical cloak” for slavery. Further, those protesting White servants in mid seventeenth-century England were early abolitionists, an argument to which we will return later.Footnote ²⁰

But, tellingly, the exploited were themselves acutely aware of the different terms of labor, as well as the relative status of each. One of the core complaints of White servants in Barbados in the mid seventeenth century was that they were Christians and should not be slaving in the fields alongside Africans. Their complaints were not against slavery per se, but against their own “enslavement.” Their use of the label “Christian” implied who should be slaves – non-Christians – rather than who should not. On the island of Montserrat to which many Irish were sent as servants in the seventeenth century, a detailed 1729 census indicates that the Irish servants and their descendants had become the major owners of slaves at a time when Montserrat was approaching its all-time peak sugar production. We should also keep in mind that the most systematic records that historians use for early modern servant migrants are court registrations of indentures dating from 1654 to 1775, mostly created in Europe prior to migration. These suggest that however large the incidence of kidnapping and abuse in the colonies – e.g. the involuntary extension of the term of indentures – most indentured migrants exercised volition over the signing of indentures and did become full citizens at the expiry of their term.Footnote ²¹ Even Portuguese degredados and English convicted felons forcibly transported to the Americas, and eventually, Australia, served time-limited terms of labor that were typically seven or fourteen years rather than for life. Most important, no servant or convict complained about the law “which keeps and makes them and there (sic) seed Slaves forever” as African slaves in Virginia did in a 1723 petition to an Anglican bishop.Footnote ²² The difference between a slave and an indentured servant was clear to the petitioners, as well as to all other categories of exploited labor. It remains unclear to some historians only because the rhetorical use of the term “slavery” to describe severe work conditions was as common in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe as it is today. Clearly, the expansion of slavery depended not just on the migration of the free, but also on the migrants having a strong sense of their own status.

Dutch slaving in the Atlantic was at a continuous disadvantage from the scarcity of free migrants, and so, too, was the French before 1763.Footnote ²³ The former had four phases. The first as described in the previous chapter supplied Brazil and ended with their effective loss of control over Pernambuco in 1647 and Luanda the following year. The second briefly saw them selling in a wide range of markets before other European powers enforced mercantilist restrictions that closed their ports to non-nationals. Between 1650 and 1674, the Dutch carried off nearly 100,000 people from Africa despite having no significant plantation colonies of their own. Third, from 1662 to 1715 Dutch slave ships sold mainly to Spanish America via their base in Curaçao in the southern Caribbean, though they were also responsible for a large share of the enslaved being taken to the nascent French colonies.Footnote ²⁴ Dutch plantations in northern South America offered a new market in the second half of the seventeenth century, and thus the fourth and final phase of Dutch slave trading saw an almost exclusive focus on these possessions after 1715 and through to the 1790s. For slave markets the French, Dutch, Danish, and English were left for the most part with the Bights and the coast north of the Congo River – where there was no Portuguese land-based presence. For a very brief five years the Dutch did take over a major part of the Portuguese Atlantic slave-trading system. They held bases just off the African coast – São Tomé and Luanda – as well as Elmina Castle but taking over all the lançado networks that supplied these Atlantic ports with slaves was beyond them. Moreover, by the 1770s the Dutch were sending more produce ventures than slave ships to Africa in another trend that has escaped historians.Footnote ²⁵

Whereas the Dutch tried and failed to take over the existing Portuguese system, the English – much the weaker maritime power in the mid seventeenth century – tried to replicate it from the real estate and the maritime space that the Portuguese had not occupied. A key element in the strategy was the maintenance of trading alliances with Portugal in one of the longest-running bilateral diplomatic links in European history. It was not surprising that the relationship emerged when the Dutch were at their strongest (and the Portuguese at their weakest) with the marriage of Charles I and Catherine of Braganza in 1662. The Treaty of Methuen in 1703 further strengthened commercial ties between the two countries and helped preserve the long-standing Portuguese slave-trading system in the Atlantic. In the late eighteenth century, a major English merchant in Lisbon financed Portuguese voyages to Asia. The diplomatic links culminated in the Strangford Treaty of 1810 that gave British manufactured goods preferential access to Brazilian markets more than a century after the Methuen Treaty.

In the late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic, it was the English who came closest to emulating the Portuguese system. Both countries had lower income levels than the Dutch and fewer remnants of the feudal ties to the land that restricted emigration from other European countries. The potential for transoceanic migration from England and Ireland was considerable and with English imperial ventures in Asia trailing those of the Dutch, the chief destination for English migrants became the Caribbean, and eventually mainland North America.Footnote ²⁶ These regions were peripheral to the Spanish imperial thrust and thus poorly defended. The English counterpart to Brazil became Barbados, Jamaica, the Leeward Islands, and eventually the US South. Migration from Europe to the tropical Americas led inevitably to a slave trade from Africa. English indentured servants enabled more extensive plantations in the Americas that the Dutch were never able to match in their own territory. Then, as the flow of servants slowed in the English Caribbean after 1660, British slave traders stepped up their deliveries of African slaves to the point where nine out of ten Africans on all British slave ships disembarked in the British Americas, a similar ratio to the Portuguese within their own system.

But unlike the Portuguese, almost from the outset of the expansion of their slave trade the English were also supplying the Spanish Empire with enslaved labor via the intra-American slave trade. Perhaps most of the Africans disembarked in Barbados in the 1660s by the Company of Royal Adventurers were subsequently carried to Spanish America according to the terms of a contract between the Company and the Genoese asientistas, Grillo and Lomellin, signed in London. The Dutch, however, were the major national group supplying the Spanish before 1720. They sold more than half the captives they carried off from Africa in foreign colonies along with all those taken to Dutch Caribbean Islands, especially Curaçao, that were sold on to the Spanish Americas.Footnote ²⁷

English attempts to encroach on the Portuguese in Africa began after Thomas Thurloes, the RAC agent in the Gambia in 1678, noted that he was buying more captives from lançados than from Africans.Footnote ²⁸ A few years later John Booker, a new agent at James Island in the Gambia wrote that he “hath cleared severall persons to live as Portuguese in the Country.”Footnote ²⁹ And indeed, Upper Guinea with its fractured political structures had a culture in which individual European traders were most likely to marry into African families and establish small-scale slaving businesses, but none of these traders fronted networks that matched those of the lançados on which the Portuguese could draw. The Dutch, French, and English slave traders made no impression on the Portuguese hold over supplies of the enslaved coming through either Cacheu and Bissau in the north or Angola and Mozambique in the south. Apart from the short-lived Dutch occupation of Luanda, almost all enslaved people leaving these ports before 1830 did so under the Portuguese flag.Footnote ³⁰

The English and the French also had limited success in breaching the system at its western end. Between 1661 and 1760, at least nine British slave ships sold, or tried to sell, slaves in Brazil.Footnote ³¹ Some of these sporadic attempts to introduce captives into the Portuguese Empire ended in confiscation. An alternative strategy quickly emerged. Francis Cock, a former employee of the RAC, wrote from Bahia in 1706, “[t]hat it is not safe to send English ships thither with slaves That if ye Compy will order any slaves to be put on board Portuguese ships and order them thither he will take care of them they are a very good Commodity and returns may be made to Lisbon.” The offer was repeated by James Blaney later that year. There was an immediate response. Roberto de Costa, Francis Cock and John Dowker sent gold and 280 tobacco rolls from Bahia in return for slaves. And several similar transactions occurred subsequently. Blaney reported “a very large number of Negroes Shipt by Mr. Duffield to Brazill” in 1714.Footnote ³² Most of the estimated 105 captives disembarked from the NS do Monserrat e Piedade in Bahia in 1721 were on the company’s account, and smaller batches totaling 230 on four separate Portuguese ships followed in the same year.Footnote ³³ But overall, the numbers involved were not large and might be described as confirming rather than threatening the Portuguese system. The only partial success the English achieved was in the minor traffic in enslaved children between Upper Guinea and Lisbon, which continued down to the Marquis of Pombal’s abolition of the slave trade to Portugal in 1761.Footnote ³⁴ French efforts to penetrate the Portuguese system were similarly unsuccessful.Footnote ³⁵ Both the British and the French extended their slave-trading activities to include all embarkation points on the African coast outside Portuguese control, but they did not come close to breaching the Portuguese system’s informal boundaries.Footnote ³⁶

The English accordingly avoided Portuguese factories in Africa. In the two decades after 1641 they obtained a few hundred captives at points where they already had long-standing connections for the African produce trade such as the River Gambia, Sierra Leone, and the Gold Coast. However, they opened a wholly new source of slaves in the Bight of Biafra that accounted for almost 70 percent of their captives in these twenty years. Initially, Old Calabar and to a lesser extent, New Calabar and the Rio del Rey were easily the most important individual markets. Thus, the charter generation of the Barbados population comprised indentured servants from London, and enslaved Igbo and Ibibio. The latter initiated a transatlantic slaving corridor between a 150 kilometer stretch of Africa lying east of the Niger Delta on the one hand, and, on the other, the English Americas. This link endured for almost 170 years; 85 percent of the ships trading in the Bight of Biafra in this era flew the British flag.

Even excluding what must have been several thousand British-purchased slaves arriving in Brazil on Portuguese vessels, we can say that for seven of the eighteenth-century decades the British carried off more Africans than did the Portuguese, and when the slave trade was at its pre-nineteenth century height between 1761 and 1807, well over half the ventures leaving Europe did so from Britain. As described in the previous chapter, some were sold on to foreign territories, mainly Spanish. Moreover, British occupation of foreign colonies during warfare was usually followed by an immediate jump in slave arrivals in the occupied colony, as in Guadeloupe, 1759–63, Havana, 1762–63, and Trinidad, 1797.Footnote ³⁷ If the British had not left the trade abruptly in 1808, there seems little doubt that they, and probably US merchants as well, would have finally begun to make inroads into the Portuguese system. In one of the great ironies of the slave trade era, given Portuguese dependence on Britain in the Napoleonic Wars, it is not difficult to imagine a pro-slave trade Britain insisting on a clause in the 1810 Strangford Treaty with Brazil that would have at last allowed British voyages into the bilateral Brazil–Africa voyage system of the South Atlantic. What was possible and desirable in 1710, however, was clearly impossible in 1810. For British slave traders this was a huge missed profit-generating opportunity.

Three English ports dominated in sequence not just the English trade, but traffic from the whole of Europe: London before 1720, Bristol from the later 1720s, and Liverpool from the mid 1740s to 1807.Footnote ³⁸ Less well known is the wide geographic range of ports involved in the business. The West Country provided the best locations for departures for Atlantic destinations. Prevailing westerlies in the English Channel could add weeks to outbound voyages from both Dutch and English Channel ports. It is not surprising that all seventeen English slave voyages recorded in the sixteenth century left from Plymouth and that a sugar refinery was operational in Bristol in 1606 long before British occupation of Barbados.Footnote ³⁹ The early dominance of Amsterdam and London as Atlantic ports emerged from their links with mainland Europe and their specialist services for merchants, not their geographic location. In England, West Country vessels sailed from Lyme, Exeter, Topsham, Poole, Falmouth, Dartmouth, Cowes, and the Channel Islands, as well as Plymouth. They carried off more than 10,000 African captives before 1763. However, the most heavily involved outside the big three were Lancaster (eighty-three recorded voyages) and Whitehaven (a further sixty-four). Another thirteen ports in England dispatched at least one voyage to Africa, including Hull, Stockton, and Newcastle upon Tyne on the east coast. Vessels from four Scottish ports accounted for almost another 5,000 African departures between 1716 and 1766. The major pattern is that apart from the early West Country activity, all the minor ports moved into the trade as it expanded in the first half of the eighteenth century. Like New England slavers, their vessels were small – averaging less than 200 Africans embarked – and traded overwhelmingly in Upper Guinea and Gold Coast ports rather than the Bights and Angola regions that attracted the much larger Liverpool slavers. Despite dispatching a total of 243 voyages, they, like Bristol and London, ultimately could not compete with Liverpool. But once more we see merchants and seamen in almost every port large enough to engage in transoceanic trade viewing the slave trade as providing investment and employment possibilities.

The French intrusion into the Portuguese Atlantic was the latest to develop. Figure 3.2 displays the trend over time in their slaving ventures. The intermittent but dramatic gaps are entirely explained by wars, during which French slave ships remained in port or took out letters of marque to harry English shipping. The underlying upward trend from the mid 1720s tracks the remarkable rise to global dominance of St. Domingue in the production of all tropical produce except rice. While the sudden ending in 1830 reflects the July monarchy’s decision to enforce abolition of the traffic.

Figure 3.2 Time profile of French transatlantic slave voyages

Source: www.slavevoyages.org/estimates/MmfdnJTA

French and English settlement of the Lesser Antilles began at about the same time and depended initially on tobacco and cotton. In sharp contrast to the English Caribbean, however, before 1700 approximately similar numbers of European settlers (mainly engagés) and African slaves arrived in St. Kitts, Martinique, and Guadeloupe.Footnote ⁴⁰ As this suggests, sugar cultivation was slower to take hold on the French islands than in the English Caribbean. Moreover, before 1670 the twenty-five slave voyages recorded as disembarking in the French Americas were all Dutch. Indeed, sugar production was boosted by the final expulsion of the Netherlands from Pernambuco in 1654, which saw several hundred Dutch Sephardic Jews relocate to Martinique and Guadeloupe together with their slaves.Footnote ⁴¹ Arrivals in the eastern Caribbean under the French flag began in 1671, though there may well have been some unrecorded French interloper landings before this date. Despite French settlement in what became St. Domingue, Martinique remained the main destination for Africans until 1715. From then until the 1791 uprising, St. Domingue absorbed four out of every five of the 840,000 slaves disembarked in the French Americas, all of them on French ships, except for 21,500 taken into the colony on captured British vessels during the periodic eighteenth-century Anglo-French conflicts. To these should be added the nearly 20,000 brought into Guadeloupe by the British during their occupation of the island, 1759–1763.Footnote ⁴²

After disappearing from the oceans during the Revolutionary Wars, French slave traders re-entered the business briefly in 1802 to 1804 and more substantially, as Figure 3.2 shows, in 1813–30.Footnote ⁴³ But in this final phase Cuba now assumed the dominant market role formerly occupied by St. Domingue. This was the only occasion in the history of the French slave trade when French slavers made a substantial contribution to the slave populations of non-French territories.Footnote ⁴⁴ A further distinctive feature of this period is that one-fifth of the post-1812 total, left from French Caribbean ports, where probably it was easier to evade official anti-slave trade sanctions than in France. The French flag continued to be used in the slave trade after 1830, but always as a flag of convenience. Portuguese, Spanish, and Brazilian investors sometimes attempted to pass as French, given that the French refused British requests for the right to stop French vessels off Africa to check the authenticity of their papers.

Within metropolitan France the pattern of wide geographic dispersion of slave-trading ports was like that in Britain. Although the French government issued lettres patentes in 1716, permitting merchants in only five ports to participate in the business – Rouen, La Rochelle, Nantes, Bordeaux, and St, Malo – slaving ventures left from twenty-two different French locations in the eighteenth century. In the seventeenth century, the leading port for all Atlantic trade had been La Rochelle. Nantes was scarcely involved in the early traffic, but aided by additional duty relief from Brittany, it dispatched 1,714 slaving ventures between 1697 and 1831. Together with three other French ports – La Rochelle, Bordeaux, and Le Havre, each sending out between 440 and 480 voyages – these four major centers accounted for 78 percent of the nearly four thousand recorded French slaving voyages.Footnote ⁴⁵

Behind such growth and dispersion lay subsidies. Unlike Britain and the Netherlands, French slave traders received major relief from duties on both outbound cargoes to Africa and on colonial produce returned from the Caribbean. Between 1716 and 1784, these acquits de Guinée, as they were called, could be sold on to merchants trading directly with the American colonies. In 1784, the system was replaced by a direct subsidy on the tonnage of the slaving vessel causing, unsurprisingly, a dramatic and fraudulent increase in the reported size of French slave ships, as well as the nominal registration of some British slave ships in French ports. The French revolutionary government abolished this subsidy with the decree of July 27, 1793. But for most of the ancien régime and through four years of revolution, France subsidized its slave trade and earned the distinction of being the only government in the Atlantic world to do so. The fact that duty relief was not extended to merchants in the colonies perhaps accounts for the absence of a colonial-based slave trade in the French Atlantic before 1800.Footnote ⁴⁶

The Portuguese and Spanish accommodated the intrusion of seventeen thousand Dutch, English, and French slaving voyages into their Atlantic slave systems rather well. The territorial integrity of their possessions on both sides of the Atlantic remained largely intact through to the nineteenth century and their access to the forced labor of Africans was never at risk. Moreover, Portuguese slave trading expanded steadily in both north and south Atlantic gyres in the eighteenth century. The traffic into the Spanish empire did decline significantly even after allowing for the vibrant intra-American traffic in the Caribbean and South America, but this was not because of Spanish inability to compete. Rather, the Spanish benefited from the rebound in the Indigenous populations that began in the second half of the seventeenth century. The recovery ensured corvée and eventually free labor enabled the silver mines to increase their output through to the end of the eighteenth century. When their European and North American rivals withdrew from the slave trade in the early nineteenth century the Spanish and Portuguese were able to seamlessly re-establish their former dominance and take the slave trade briefly to new heights. The overall peak year in 350 years of transatlantic trading occurred in 1829, not in the late eighteenth century, when the British and French traffic were at their respective heights.

Iberian resilience and resurgence in the face of prolonged competition from innovative and well-financed Dutch, British, and French was rooted in three key advantages: the enduring success of the Iberian imperial project in the Americas, their command of goods vital for obtaining slaves, and the impact of abolition. The previous chapter has already tracked the strong growth in output in Latin America relative to the overseas possessions of the other European colonial powers. As for trade goods, both Spanish and Portuguese America produced commodities that comprised universal global currencies – silver and gold. These gave them easy access to global markets, especially to Asian textiles.Footnote ⁴⁷ In the eighteenth century the silver bought slaves in the intra-American trade. After 1807 when the Spanish re-entered the transatlantic trade, American bullion formed part of their trading cargoes from Cuba to Africa.Footnote ⁴⁸ In addition, the oily, spicy sweet tobacco of northeastern Brazil when cured, wrapped in thick strands around a rod, coated in molasses, bound usually in goat skin, and weighing 80–90 lbs a unit, became an indispensable trade good on the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin. The Portuguese may not have conquered Africa, but in the sixteenth century and for the last 170 years of the transatlantic traffic they were able to assemble trading cargoes based on gold from first Mina in West Africa and later Brazil, as well as rolls of tobacco that apparently could not be produced elsewhere.Footnote ⁴⁹ The third element preserving the Iberian system was, paradoxically, abolition. Starting with Danes in 1792 and continuing with the British and the Americans in 1807, the Dutch in 1815, and the French in 1830, the northwestern intrusion came to a voluntary end. Consequently, in the nineteenth century, the business returned to its fifteenth-century Iberian and multinational roots.

European Attitudes Toward the Slave Trade

Within the framework of national participation, there lies the question of who was involved in the slave trade, and, beyond that, the extent to which their attitudes to the business differed from those of the general population. The coverage of slavery in the media, the destruction of statues associated with slavery, and the thrust of respected academic projects such as “Legacies of British Slave-Ownership” and, more recently “Legacies of the British Slave Trade: The Structure and Significance of British Slave Trade Investment, 1550–1807,” implicitly suggest that enslavers held values that were different from the general population and are thus uniquely culpable for past horrors. Underlying this attitude is the unstated conviction that we can best understand the past by the applying the values of the present to any historical analysis. In fact, an examination of those involved in forcibly moving 12.75 million Africans from their sub-continent homes shows that they were neither small in number, nor high and mighty in social status. Until the mid nineteenth century there is no evidence that any significant segment of the population shared modern attitudes to the African diaspora. Worse, among abolitionists, there was no shortage of a racism matching that of the slave traders.Footnote ⁵⁰

The diversity of the merchandise, the geographic range of production sites, and the composition of the slave-trading firms speak to the awareness of all Europeans and their acceptance of the extension of slavery around the Atlantic world. The European-based maritime slave trade with Africa continued uninterrupted through to its three-hundred-year peak in the late eighteenth century without significant opposition in either sub-continent – European or sub-Saharan Africa. Black people, including slaves, could be seen in all the larger European slaving ports, with 10 percent of the Lisbon population comprising Blacks in the early sixteenth century.Footnote ⁵¹ From modern perspectives awareness of such a presence was a case of an abolitionist dog that did not bark. In the Netherlands, England, and France, the transatlantic slave trade continued across three centuries with not even a Vallodolid-type discussion on who should be enslaved. Nor was there anything equivalent to the 1555 protest in the Portuguese case of Dominican friar Fernão Oliveira in his Arte da Guerro do Mar. In northwest Europe it was truly an “unthinking decision” in Winthrop Jordan’s well-known comment on the adoption of racial slavery in the English colonies.Footnote ⁵²

Thousands of workers across Europe depended on merchandise traded for slaves for their livelihoods. Long before the mass petitions against the trade in the abolitionist era a major petitioning campaign in favor of the slave trade in 1707–1713 gets much less attention.Footnote ⁵³ In the early eighteenth century the issue was not abolition, but the ending of the monopoly of the Royal African Company, a measure that would greatly stimulate the expansion of the slave trade. Petitioners on both sides of this issue naturally assumed there was nothing immoral about the business. The House of Commons received two hundred petitions from forty communities outside London, most of them centers of woolen manufacturing. Organizers favored numbers over social status so that many literate spinners and weavers must have signed.Footnote ⁵⁴ In a startling inversion of their nineteenth-century efforts to suppress the slave trade, between 1731 and 1787 thirteen fully commissioned naval vessels and one transport vessel commissioned by the British government carried more than one thousand enslaved Africans from mainly the Gold Coast to Barbados. These no doubt comprised speculative ventures by the ships’ officers.Footnote ⁵⁵ A few years later hundreds of sailors from slave ships rioted against their employers in what was then (1775) the largest slave-trading center in the world – Liverpool. Yet the issue was not the slave trade itself but wages – in other words the distribution of revenue that the slave trade generated.Footnote ⁵⁶

On the continent of Europe, there was no significant worker opposition to the slave trade until the nineteenth century and even then, no mass petitioning of national legislatures. As explained in Chapter 6, French abolition of slavery in 1794 was a bourgeois measure and is best understood as a reaction to the St. Domingue Rebellion rather than a reflection of domestic hostility to slavery.Footnote ⁵⁷ As noted in Chapter 6, during the French Revolution slave-ship owners renamed their vessels Assemblée Nationale, Soldat Patriote, Bon Citoyen, Révolution, Nouvelle Constitution, and Mirabeau, without any apparent sense of the tension between the revolutionary ideals embodied in the name and the wretched business that these vessels carried on.

As the Liverpool riot suggests, workers in the industry themselves could be counted in the thousands. But slave ships constituted a tiny part of the merchant navy of any country. In Middelburg, an average of one slave vessel left port every month. In Liverpool at the slave trade’s peak, an average of 2.5 slaving ventures left each week, at a time when hundreds of vessels cleared from both ports weekly. But slave vessels were heavily manned, especially in wartime. In 1786 and 1787, years of peace, a total of 419 slave ships set sail from European ports on voyages that would take between one and two years to complete. They were manned by a mean of 35 crew, suggesting a workforce of 14,670 at sea – with no doubt three or four times this number remaining in port having made the voyage possible by building, fitting out, and provisioning the ship.Footnote ⁵⁸

But it was not just the size and wide distribution of the workforce across Europe enabling the slave trade that is striking. A review of the evolution of investment in the business shows a similar pattern. In the mid sixteenth century the English merchant community in Seville numbered at least one hundred. The first English sugar plantation owner shows up in early sixteenth-century La Palma in the Canaries, not in seventeenth-century Barbados. Along with other English merchants, the owner, Thomas Maillard, traded in slaves, sixteen of whom are listed in his will.Footnote ⁵⁹ Robert Thorne owned many slaves in Andalusia and the Canaries more than fifty years before the famous Hawkins’ transatlantic voyages of the 1560s. More important were the Pinellis of Genoa, the Florentine Berardi brothers and Bartolomeo Marchionni (who first represented the Cambini bank, and then operated independently in Lisbon after the bank’s 1482 bankruptcy). These merchants financed businesses that employed slave labor in Andalusia as well as the Canary Islands, along with Spanish partners.Footnote ⁶⁰ A Genoese company in Seville funded ventures intended to carry 4,000 individuals from Africa to the Americas, including the very first recorded voyage direct from Africa, owned by Genoa’s Polo de Espindola. The licenses, issued by Charles V in 1518, were first granted to the Flemish Laurent de Gouvenot. Ten years later, the Spanish Crown awarded an Asiento (contract) for four years to Heinrich Ehinger and Hieronymus Sayler, agents of the German Welser family. Eventually, despite an eighty-year war for independence from the Spanish, Dutch capital also became involved.Footnote ⁶¹ And two thousand Portuguese merchants were based in Seville by 1600, including many conversos (former Jews). Overseas ventures were European rather than Iberian enterprises, with continuing Genoese involvement. Within Iberia it is often impossible to separate Spanish from Portuguese ownership except via the issuer of the license, a permit that was typically resold more than once before the voyages it authorized left port.Footnote ⁶²

Equity in individual voyages was similarly widely distributed. After 1640, patterns of ownership remained international through to the end of the slave trade era. But whereas before 1640 the non-Iberian component was mainly northern Italian, German and Flemish, after 1640 the pan-European character was expressed via new national groups entering the business under their own flags, including small states such as the Duchy of Courland (now Latvia) and, prior to Napoleon’s reorganization of Germany, Brandenburg. Unlike the early Iberians, each of the northwestern nations used state-sponsored chartered companies with nationally defined monopoly rights to break into the slave trade.Footnote ⁶³ All of them eventually incurred losses that put them out of business. Table 3.2 lays out the contributions to the slave trade of the more important of them.

The ultimately disastrous Dutch venture into Brazil and Angola undermined the original Dutch West India Company founded in 1621, and in 1648 the Dutch revoked its monopoly access to the African coast. Despite this, in 1674 a second reorganization of the West-Indische Compagnie created the only Dutch institution allowed to trade in slaves across the Atlantic. Some Dutch “free” traders had already moved their operations to the Baltic and conducted business under the label of Swedish, Danish, Brandenburg, and Courland chartered companies. Others became “interlopers” sailing illegally from Dutch ports. The monopoly of the reorganized (or Nieuw) WIC was finally eliminated in 1734. Although Dutch plantations had emerged in Surinam, Demerara, Essequibo, and Berbice, the Dutch company continued to supply enslaved labor to the Spanish via the entrepôt of Curacao Island until 1715, before leaving the business totally in 1734 very heavily indebted. Its 386 slave voyages had carried off 187,000 captives to the Americas in addition to forty-eight ventures shipping nothing but African produce.Footnote ⁶⁴

The French dalliance with state-sponsored chartered companies enforcing monopoly rights was more complicated. Colbert’s Compagnie des Indes Occidentales lasted only eight years. From 1672 the Compagnie du Sénégal was awarded exclusive rights to trade north of the Sierra Leone River only, and in 1685 the Compagnie de Guinée (becoming in 1701 the Compagnie de l’Asiente) held monopoly rights to the rest of West Africa. Altogether eight separate French chartered companies sent out 283 voyages that carried off an estimated 83,000 captives from Africa.Footnote ⁶⁵ None of these companies survived for long, however, and by the end of the second decade of the eighteenth century the French traffic was largely in the hands of private merchants based in Nantes, La Rochelle, St. Malo, Bordeaux, and Le Havre, a reality recognized by the Crown’s lettres patentes of 1716 and 1717. A few state-chartered companies in Portugal emerged with monopoly rights. The Marquis de Pombal tried to create monopolies centered on each of the major Brazilian ports in the 1750s. Only the company serving the smaller markets of Maranhão and Para (the Companhia Geral do Grão-Pará e Maranhão) and Pernambuco (the Companhia Geral de Pernambuco e Paraíba) had brief success – but their monopolies did not survive Pombal’s fall from power in 1777. These chartered companies were easily the largest slave traders in the Portuguese business, accounting for almost 2,000 voyages overall, as Table 3.2 shows.

The English monopoly slave-trading companies are usually classed as failures, but the Company of Royal Adventurers (1662–1672), the Royal African Company (1672–1731), and the South Sea Company (1713–1740) dispatched a total of 876 slaving ventures, to which should be added at least 418 intra-American voyages carrying captives mainly from Jamaica to the Spanish American mainland for the South Sea Company. This third joint-stock company had been formed in anticipation of Spain granting the Asiento contract to Britain in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht – albeit with the King of Spain coming to hold 28 percent of its stock. When the terms of the treaty were announced, crowds in London celebrated wildly. None of this reckons with the 222 produce voyages that the RAC sent out that returned directly to London with ivory, gold, and dyewoods. Alone of all the companies mentioned here, it actually paid a dividend of 10 percent on its stock between 1676 and 1688 and was regarded as just as secure as its much larger East Indies counterpart. Yet, paradoxically, the English were the first to begin a shift to de facto free trading in slaves when, in 1689, the common law Court of King’s Bench refused to recognize the RAC’s right to confiscate the property of merchants trading in violation of the Crown’s prerogative-sponsored monopoly.Footnote ⁶⁶ Ultimately the RAC could not survive without the monopoly. The South Sea Company fell victim to the vicissitudes of the Anglo-Spanish relationship so this, too, was ultimately a financial failure.Footnote ⁶⁷

These digressions on chartered companies are important here because the stock of the three largest of these companies was widely held. The West-Indische Compagnie (both new and old), the Royal African Company, and the South Sea Company had many thousands of shareholders with perhaps most of those investing in the last of this trio losing heavily in the South Sea Bubble.Footnote ⁶⁸ Each had a long tail of small investors – in the RAC’s case 5,000 shareholders along with 358 directors from the commercial elite – during its seventy-year existence. One of the directors, John Blunt, was one of two co-founders of the South Sea Company; and several others were directors of both companies. Most RAC ventures used vessels that the company had hired for the purpose, the owners of which received a portion of the slaves that survived the voyage as payment – thus widening further the pool of those with a direct interest in the slave trade. Yet despite these impressive numbers, it is easy to establish that private investment enabled and sustained the traffic. Overall, a total of at least 40,000 transatlantic slave voyages occurred over the 350-year-long transatlantic slave trade era. State sponsored company ventures could have accounted for only 5 percent of these.Footnote ⁶⁹

As in the Americas, any port large enough to organize a transoceanic voyage invested in a slaving venture when it became legally possible to do so. Ninety-two separate ports stretching from Tønsborg in southern Norway to Trieste in Italy, dispatched at least one expedition during the slave trade era.Footnote ⁷⁰ By the time the European slave trade reached its late-eighteenth-century peak a dramatic consolidation had taken place, with only 26 of these ports remaining engaged, ships from two of which, Liverpool and Nantes, accounted for almost half of the people carried off from Africa between 1781 and 1790. And in the next decade Liverpool alone accounted for well over half of all slave-ship departures not just from Britain, but from the whole of Europe.

An even more striking consolidation is apparent if we focus on owners rather than places. Slavevoyages.org contains the names of 30,000 captains and owners of slave ships, two-thirds of them based in Europe. The “People of the Atlantic Slave Trade” project (PAST) has edited this data, as well as adding biographical information when available. Preliminary analysis suggests that slave-trading companies owned and operated by individuals existed after the chartered company era, but that private equity was vested in families rather than corporations. The great bulk of the slave trade comprised partnerships formed for a single voyage, with different prominent multigenerational families playing key roles in each port. Equity holdings were fluid and constantly shifting yet allowed for the small investor.

The largest incorporated entity (apart from the state-sponsored chartered companies) was Zeeland’s MCC, which dispatched 112 voyages between 1730 and 1797 carrying 31,000 captives. At any given time, the company had roughly 400 shareholders, about half of whom held fractions of a share.Footnote ⁷¹ In Amsterdam after the withdrawal of the WIC from slave trading, the partnership of father and son, Jochem Matthijs Smitt and Coenraad Smitt, carried off 12,000 enslaved Africans to Suriname over a thirty-year period.Footnote ⁷² The Rotterdam firm of Coopstad and Rochussen took 21,246, almost all to the Dutch Guianas between 1749 and 1789.Footnote ⁷³ The ships of Jacques- François Begouën of Le Havre carried off 19,255 enslaved people. The Nairac family of Bordeaux took 17,623 others and in Nantes, the Montaudoins carried 23,956 in the first half of the eighteenth century, with the Bouteillers assuming the dominant role thereafter with 22,335 enslaved. But a dozen families in Liverpool invested in voyages that carried much larger numbers. The largest individual investor was William Boats, whose vessels carried off 55,361 people, with the largest family being the Gregsons, all of Liverpool. The Gregsons were responsible for transporting 136,000 captives on 401 ventures. Generally, the major Liverpool families – the Aspinalls, the Hodgsons, the Tarletons, the Earls, and William Davenport – carried off twice as many or more captives than their largest continental counterparts. The latter would not have made the top ten of Liverpool owners, nor would any of the slave traders of the Americas.Footnote ⁷⁴ This did not stop direct British investment in the slave trade ending abruptly in 1807.

Most leading families entered the traffic early and their investments grew with the trade. Typically, the distribution of ownership was wider in the first half of the eighteenth century than in its closing decades as the larger families increased their dominance. Liverpool slave merchants tended to have parents who were of more modest origins than those in the major continental centers and came from towns in their port’s hinterland. In France and the Netherlands, the early investors appear to have been merchants or local dignitaries and/or persons with positions in local government. In Liverpool, by contrast, the fathers of the founders of the top ten major families tended to come from more modest origins; in David Pope’s words “few came from either a wealthy or a poor background.” Only two of them were merchants or local officials and the occupations of “porter,” “mariner,” “yeoman,” “brewer,” and “barber” appear in the record, together with “gentleman/lawyer.” Further, Pope’s analysis of wills indicates that “participation in the slave trade did not guarantee vast wealth. Few of the leading Liverpool slave merchants … achieved enormous wealth.” Pope’s list of ninety-four leading eighteenth-century Liverpool slave trade merchants, a list confirmed by the recently launched PAST user interface, shows that only twenty-two left estates valued at more than £10,000.Footnote ⁷⁵

Yet this focus on the large investor misses a key feature of investment in the slave trade. Across Europe, including Liverpool, the most striking feature of the distribution of equity is the exceptionally long tail of small investors, defined as those with interests in no more than two ventures. Of course, the slavevoyages.org data on ownership does not give us the amount invested. An interest might be as little as a one thirty-second share, whereas a major investor might be the sole owner of a venture. Treating all investors as equally important therefore understates inequality. But the purpose of this exercise is to show the number of people interested in the business rather than to calculate relative levels of investment. Across the Atlantic world, owners of slave voyages invested in an average of only eight ventures during their careers.Footnote ⁷⁶

In the Netherlands over 90 percent of those with equity in the slave trade had stakes in no more than two voyages. In his only recorded investment, Theunis Reijersz, a compass maker, was one of nine owners of the Vergulde Zon, which in 1668 delivered 215 captives to Curacao on their way, no doubt, to Spanish America.Footnote ⁷⁷ Individuals primarily in other professions such as sailmaker Albert van der Veer and wine merchant Andries van der Poest also made small investments. In Bordeaux the ratio of small investors was just under 80 percent of total owners. Then there is the example of the Saint George (ID 24929) of Chester, which had ten owners of the venture from Bonny to Barbados in 1753, three of whom were “apprentices.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Scattered information on fathers’ occupations, also from PAST, again reveals middling sorts of origins – a sea captain, an apothecary, a stockbroker, and a couple with interests in Cape Breton – not surprising given Bordeaux’s links with French Canada. In the largest French port, Nantes, the small investor ratio was close to three-quarters. For the two hundred investors identified in Lisbon between 1781 and 1830, small investors comprised 79 percent of the total. In the early English trade, even when the Royal African Company was at its most successful (between 1672 and 1712), we still have the names of 450 individuals who invested in transatlantic slaving ventures sailing independently of the RAC, mostly from London.Footnote ⁷⁹ The outlier in this brief survey was, as we might expect, Liverpool, which at 50 percent had the lowest small-investor ratio of all major European slaving ports. Despite Liverpool’s importance, however, it seems that overall, at least two-thirds of those Europeans with a direct financial interest in the business comprised minor investors, even though their investments could not have provided the bulk of slave trade financing. Their role has attracted little scholarly attention.Footnote ⁸⁰

The larger investors – defined as those holding equity in at least three voyages – included families already well-established in shipping and trade that had nothing to do with the slave trade. Pieter van Wickevoort was a director of the WIC, but his primary interest, together with his son, was the Baltic and whaling trades. Both the original and the Nieuw WIC shared investors with the Dutch East India Company (the VOC) and captains, too. The most complete set of financial records for a major trader – the Davenport papers – indicate a wide range of business investments that generated more than one-third of William Davenport’s net income. It is highly probable that very few traders relied exclusively on slaves for their income.Footnote ⁸¹ In the nineteenth century national flags became less important as ownership reverted to multinational groups, with vessels sometimes sailing with faux papers or often without any papers at all. There is no evidence of the major Nantes families re-entering the post-1814 business as the French traffic revived. As already discussed, the organizational base of the traffic shifted back to the Americas, but investors on the scale of the large eighteenth-century Liverpool families never emerged elsewhere. Moreover, in Rhode Island, Sean Kelley has calculated that 71 percent of seagoing ventures owned by individuals identified as slave traders between 1768 and 1775 had nothing to do with the slave trade.Footnote ⁸² The new data on ownership suggest that the Atlantic world had very few merchants who specialized in slave trading.

As argued in Chapter 2, Portugal’s pattern of equity in the slave trade was quite unique in Europe and had more in common with ownership in Asian and Brazilian commerce than with the rest of the European trade. It is particularly striking that the Portuguese and Spanish dominated the Atlantic slave trade from beginning to end without ever developing the large family firms present in British and French slave trafficking. By far the largest single slave-trading firm in Portugal was the Companhia Geral do Grao Para e Maranhão. Between 1755 and 1788, it forcibly removed almost 30,000 people from the Bissau and Cacheu region in Upper Guinea using the northern Atlantic gyre. Ownership data is, however, inadequate for analysis for the pre-1700 era. For the long eighteenth century to 1812, data exist for just over half of the 676 slaving ventures recorded as leaving Portugal. The Para and Maranhäo company owned 151 of this sample. The top 10 percent of owners accounted for only 35 percent of captives. A further 227 slave vessels set sail from Iberian ports between 1813 and 1865 – four-fifths from Lisbon and Cadiz – and yet no individual investor can be linked to more than ten of these ventures. Nevertheless, such data exaggerates the degree of ownership concentration, given that the record frequently contains only the name of the principal owner.

In addition, Portuguese slave traders made extensive use of sea loans, a medieval credit instrument where the lender assumed the risks of the loan and the borrower repaid the principal and interest only if the venture was successful with amounts tied to a specific vessel and voyage.Footnote ⁸³ Interest rates were extremely high compared to borrowing rates in northern Europe, but the option was available to large and small investors alike. There is abundant evidence of seamen, skilled workers, and small traders, some organized into societies, using sea loans to engage in transoceanic trade.Footnote ⁸⁴ Moreover, as described in the previous chapter, crew members made small ventures in lieu of wages. As a consequence, vessels left Africa with numerous small batches of slaves on board with a different owner for each batch, a practice that runs through the Lusophone slave trade from the Madanela Cansyna in 1513 to the 25 voyages mentioned in letters written between 1848 and 1850 from Bahia and found in King Kosoko’s house in Lagos at the end of the Brazilian slave trade.Footnote ⁸⁵ Equity in the Portuguese-dominated South Atlantic traffic must have been much more widely distributed than was its North Atlantic counterpart, widespread though ownership and participation was in Britain and the Netherlands. Certainly, private equity was responsible for the great majority of slave-trading ventures based in Portuguese and Brazilian ports. But the line between capitalists and workers in such ventures is awkward if not impossible to divine.Footnote ⁸⁶

The closest parallel to this Portuguese pattern may be observed in the small Brandenburg traffic where the Brandenburg African Company tolerated crew members including junior officers holding private ventures in the business.Footnote ⁸⁷ Clearly only a small minority of Europeans invested in the slave trade and the above analysis is not intended to suggest that small investors contributed the bulk of financing for the business. Rather the intention is to demonstrate that a wide range of people invested in an activity that appeared to them to be no different from trading in farm animals or in inanimate commodities. Risk, profit, and loss were the sole considerations. If the returns from the slave trade were somewhat higher than in other lines of business, it was not because of investors avoiding the business for moral reasons. In the rapidly developing pamphlet and newspaper cultures of the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century, Dutch, French, and British voices such as Willem Usselinx, Jean Bodin, Thomas Tryon, and John Atkins casting doubt on slavery and the slave trade between 1560 and 1760 win a lot of attention. They are seen as precursors of the abolitionist critique that began to receive mass support in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, but this in no way deterred investors even in the twenty years prior to abolition. Boycotts of sugar beginning in 1792 there may have been, but there is no trace of boycotts of shares in slaving ventures even as late as 1807.

Finally, we should note that for more than a millennium Christians were held in slavery in North Africa, and Muslims likewise in Europe, as well as after 1600 in the Americas also. Some were redeemed, most were not. The Barbary corsairs ensured that the number of Europeans held in such captivity increased along with the growth of the transatlantic slave trade. Sailing ships navigating the English Channel to and from the Atlantic often spent weeks waiting for favorable winds, particularly westbound vessels. Channel ports became safe havens, with “the Downs,” a shallow anchorage off Deal, being the most prominent. In the first week of November 1721, among the ships taking shelter were four who had or were intending to have a human cargo. Two of them were naval vessels full of redeemed – meaning purchased – English slaves from Salé in modern Morocco, one of the principal centers of the Barbary corsairs. A third was a Maryland-bound vessel carrying sixty-two convicts – coincidentally, shortly to experience a spectacular rebellion by prisoners. The fourth was a Royal African Company vessel on its way to buy 200 slaves for Jamaica. This small group of British ships, conceivably anchored next to each other, encapsulated the European solution to the labor shortages following on from overseas expansion. These vessels were buying both White and Black captives, the naval ships bound for England and freedom, and the slave ship to Africa/Caribbean and slavery. The convict group had intermediate status in that its members were banished for seven- or fourteen-year terms. Given that convicts would have been sold on arrival (but were nevertheless not slaves), what we have here are three varieties of the extreme commodification of humanity. More important in this context, no European would have seen anything remarkable, much less ironic, in this juxtaposition of voyages. If pressed, a European observer – like the Maori chief 114 years later in the Chatham Islands, mentioned in Chapter 1 – may well have said “it was in accordance with our custom.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Thousands of captains, seamen and even some owners of slaves were themselves enslaved during the slave trade era without this having any apparent impact on their views of slavery. Claas Jacobs was enslaved in Morocco but continued in the slave trade when eventually redeemed – rising to captain the slaver Lea in 1787.Footnote ⁸⁹ A century earlier the Earl of Inchiquin was captured and enslaved by Barbary pirates for a year, but when redeemed became Governor of Jamaica and suppressed a slave uprising there in 1691.Footnote ⁹⁰ James Irving captained the slave ship Anna in 1789, was captured en route to Africa, enslaved and sold to Mawlay ‘Abd al- Rahman, son of the Emperor of Morocco. Ransomed almost two years later, he returned to the trade immediately as captain of the Ellen. Irving noted the large number of enslaved crews of French ships working in the fields where he was held.Footnote ⁹¹ Later abolitionist John Newton was also enslaved and forced to work on an African plantation but captained three slave voyages after his release, all of them after experiencing a profound religious experience.Footnote ⁹² Pieter Grootschaar captained two West-Indische Compagnie voyages before spending seven years enslaved in North Africa. There is no evidence that any of these men changed their minds about the slave trade. True, slave-ship captain John Newton did become an abolitionist, but his conversion to the cause occurred many years later.Footnote ⁹³ Near-death experiences made no difference, either. Stephen Deane captained eight voyages to the Gambia and thence to South Carolina or Georgia between 1765 and 1773. The seventh was ended by a slave revolt that destroyed the vessel and left only two survivors in a ship’s boat on the open sea, one of whom was Captain Deane, the other an African captive. Undeterred, Deane returned to England and obtained the command of another slaving expedition, this one completed to the satisfaction of the owners, and presumably himself.Footnote ⁹⁴ Not covered here are the thousands of captives of European descent, not connected directly to slavery and the slave trade who were held by the Barbary pirates. One can scour their narratives, too, without finding, at least until the age of abolition, any traces of abhorrence of slavery as opposed to an abhorrence of being enslaved.Footnote ⁹⁵

Captivity stories are of course scattered throughout the history of slavery, including in the Bible. But personal experience as either an enslaver or an enslaved person did not lead any to question the institution’s legitimacy, an issue taken up again in Chapter 5 in the African context. In not one case did the experience of enslavement provoke a reaction in the captive other than that slavery was one of life’s risks to be avoided at all costs yet taken advantage of when possible. In this respect most of the eighteenth century – when abolitionism as a movement originated – was no different from the preceding four millennia, back to when the first written evidence of slavery in Mesopotamia has survived. Over this period, it is likely that very few captives indeed became convinced by their experience as a slave that slavery itself should not exist.Footnote ⁹⁶ Modern attitudes to the slave-free dichotomy where anyone enslaved is automatically assumed to be opposed to slavery, make it impossible to understand the shared mindset of most Europeans and Africans of the pre-1800 era on this issue.

The group of people with a direct interest in the trade constituted a wide cross section of European society – from rich to poor, from Quakers to Catholic priests, from political radicals to monarchists, from ordinary seamen to Humphry Morice, Governor of the Bank of England, and sponsor of eighty-three slave voyages. From Queen Anne, the second largest shareholder of the South Sea Company, to the cabin boys on the 653 Royal African Company slave voyages – and certainly not the several hundred shareholders of the RAC over its sixty-year existence – no one had any moral or humanitarian cause to avoid the business. The stream of Europeans migrating to the West Indies to take up supervisory positions on plantations continued well into the abolitionist era. The poet Robert Burns, famed for challenging the social order with often bitter satire, nevertheless resolved to emigrate to a Jamaican plantation. He booked a berth on a ship leaving Greenock in September 1786 and withdrew just prior to departure only because of the sudden and unexpected success of his celebrated first book, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. Given his energetic love life in Ayrshire, he might well have sexually outperformed Thomas Thistlewood, his near contemporary, had he embarked.Footnote ⁹⁷

We do not know the share of the population that owned slaves in the eighteenth-century colonies, but we do know that when Britain compensated its slave owners in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery itself the vast majority of those claiming compensation “owned only a handful of slaves,” most of whom will remain unidentified but certainly included many doctors, clergymen, and soldiers’ widows across British society.Footnote ⁹⁸ Across the Americas, runaway slaves formed independent societies in remote regions of land-abundant plantation colonies. Called quilombos in Brazil, palenques in Spanish America, and maroon communities in Jamaica and Surinam, they survived in many cases through to abolition and down to the present. But they, too, held enslaved people. The Accompong Town maroons in Jamaica petitioned the colonial government in 1840 for compensation for their slaves freed by the British abolition act, unsuccessfully as it turned out. And in Brazil, some slaves were also themselves slave owners for a further five decades after this.Footnote ⁹⁹ Until the late eighteenth century there is no reason to think that conceptions of morality, and more specifically, attitudes to slavery and the slave trade of the above slices of society were any different from those of the rest of the population. Today’s value systems are ill-equipped to explore slavery and slave trading of the past. Applying modern values to all historical figures would surely reveal the racist attitudes of every one of such figures. There would be no statues or plaques left standing to anyone living before the late eighteenth century.

Finally, awareness and acceptance of slavery at all levels of society was implicit in consumer behavior. The root cause of the slave plantations in the Americas was not the avarice of powerful slave merchants scattered across Europe’s ports and financial centers, but rather the tastes of consumers across the income spectrum. From one perspective – as discussed in Chapter 1 – consumer demand for plantation produce such as tobacco, sugar, coffee, and alcohol, comprised trivial additions to consumer diets. They added nothing to the shelter, core foodstuffs, and clothing of ordinary people. Other tropical goods such as dyes for textiles, rice, and raw cotton were core products, but always comprised a tiny share of global output before the nineteenth century. In another sense, as discussed below, they constituted the birth of the non-material needs that encompass status. Cocoa in Spain, coffee in France and the Netherlands, eventually tea in Britain, and tobacco, alcohol, and sugar everywhere in Western Europe had themselves become necessities by the end of the slave trade. As Carole Shammas observes, “almost every overseas settlement controlled by Western Europeans had a direct or indirect relationship to [the] demand for tropical consumer goods.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Everyone knew how these were obtained. Against a few isolated individuals expressing reservations about holding people as property we have hundreds of thousands of people directly involved in trading people and electing to go to the slave colonies to pursue careers on plantations. In addition, consumption of slave-grown products across all sectors of the population increased rapidly, and huge investment in the tropical plantations occurred. An organized boycott of sugar, largely ineffective, did occur late in the abolition era. Yet as slave plantations spread across the Caribbean after 1640, consumers were happy to take advantage of falling sugar prices, sailors to accept any higher wages associated with a Guinea voyage, merchants to reap new investment opportunities, and governments (national and municipal) to receive higher tax revenues.

Impact of the Slave Trade on Europe

Everyone in Europe was aware of the horrors of slavery and the slave trade, but what did the traffic contribute to European welfare? We begin with the merchandise that European nations shipped to Africa. Europe consistently produced about half the goods traded on Africa’s Atlantic coast – a little more in West Africa, a little less in West Central Africa. Asia and the Americas supplied the other half in roughly equal proportions. These ratios held from the 1680s onward when the Bahian and Pernambuco tobacco traffic became important, and when all Western European countries had established strong trading connections with Asia and the Indian Ocean. No single European nation could supply the extraordinary range of goods and produce that Africans required in exchange for the enslaved. The great diversity of cultures and resources in sub-Saharan Africa ensured a matching diversity in regional consumer tastes that could be met only by drawing on global supply chains. A typical post-1680 slave trading cargo would include items from every continent between the Arctic and Antarctic.

The early voyages leaving Portugal and Spain, even before the transatlantic traffic got underway, exchanged merchandise from all over Europe for enslaved people. The customs accounts for fifteen vessels arriving in Santiago in the Cape Verdes between 1513 and 1515 show textiles from a wide range of European countries as well as containers, both earthenware and metal, dominating the trade goods, with English cloth making up the largest category. Iron and beads, so important in later trade in this region, are absent in these early years, iron because the Portuguese crown banned the sale to Africans of weapons or the materials to make them, notwithstanding the fact that African iron was available from Mende traders and sometimes made its way back to Portugal.Footnote ¹⁰¹ By 1526 according to the trade book of a vessel buying slaves in Sierra Leone and the southern rivers of Senegambia, semiprecious beads and brass bracelets, probably German or Italian, had become the third most important merchandise group. By the early seventeenth century East Indian textiles and iron expanded the range of offerings.Footnote ¹⁰² Later in the century the Royal African Company records show iron, much of it made in Sweden, becoming central to trading in Upper Guinea to the point where “bars” became the unit of account in the region through to the end of the slave trade era.Footnote ¹⁰³ For 1684 to 1692, we have the accounts of a major Luanda slave trader that show textiles – mostly East Indian – accounting for two-thirds of trade goods, with beads and alcohol comprising a further 10 percent. Metals and weapons were of trivial importance.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

From 1785 to the end of the traffic we have the best evidence of trade goods in the history of the slave trade, with details of merchandise exchanged for nearly 700,000 captives as recorded in the Luanda custom house.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Here, too, textiles predominated – accounting for 54.7 percent of total values – with, as we might expect in a period spanning industrialization, European cloth gradually replacing its Asian competitor. The entry of English, Dutch, French, and American colonists into the business had little effect on the type of merchandise imported into Africa from the Americas. Alcohol and tobacco arrived from the New World, but overall, 50–60 percent of imports comprised English woolens, Silesian linens, Swedish iron bars, Dutch pans and pottery, and sundry other manufactured goods. Metal goods, including weaponry, rarely reached 10 percent, and alcohol and tobacco accounting for much of the remainder was a pattern that held throughout for Western African imports from Arguim in the north to Benguela in the south.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ This, despite pronounced regional variations in African consumer preferences. Beads and shells could be vital in initiating trade but were of small importance overall.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Each of the major Western slave-trading countries had their own textile manufacturers so that production was widely distributed geographically. Merchants in major ports like Nantes, Middelburg, and Liverpool placed orders locally for cloth based on the latest reports from West Africa about shifting African tastes. To show the significance of the African market to Europe we can select the five-year period when slave sales on the coast were at their greatest and multiply the number of slaves by the average price per slave. Between 1786 and 1790 – just prior to the St. Domingue slave rebellion – slave traders carried off an extraordinary 505,000 enslaved people, about 4 percent of the total 350-year traffic in just five years. Multiplying the annual totals for these years by the average price gives us the annual value of the trade FOB (free on board) in Europe, when that trade was at its greatest.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The five-year total of 65.8 million is in constant pounds sterling (year 1700=100), or L13.1 million a year, but only 55 percent of that annual figure comprised European merchandise. Measured against the total population of Western Europe of 100 million, or that sub-continent’s total merchandise exports, this amount is certainly trivial. After converting from official values to real values, exports to Africa account for 1–2 percent of British, Dutch, or French total trade after excluding merchandise exchanged by slave traders for produce rather than people.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ For most years of the slave trade era the ratio would have been a small fraction of one percent. In Peter Coclanis’ words:

For particular ports the impact might be different and indeed, our best records for the slave trade derive from the ports that organized and dispatched slave ships, whether official documents, newspapers, or the private papers of slave merchants.Footnote ¹¹¹ Yet, as Coclanis suggests, a broader perspective indicates that the traffic sustaining overseas slavery was relatively small.

The latest attempt to defend the primacy of slavery in the economic development of the Western World is Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson, Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution or SCIR. However, this publication does not use TSTD correctly and offers arguments that the slavevoyages data do not support.Footnote ¹¹² The central claim is that British slavery dominated the economy when the slave trade was at its height, between 1730 and 1807. It is certainly correct that the British transatlantic slave trade was the largest in this period, but in second place the Portuguese were never far behind – in the 1740s, 1776–1785, and again in 1803–1807, the Portuguese recovered their dubious first-place distinction. But, in any event, the slave trade was a relatively small part of the plantation complex. One needs to see where the enslaved ultimately disembarked. Berg and Hudson ignore what slavevoyages tells us about this and, just as important, they ignore the intra-American traffic that now has its own database on slavevoyages. More than one-fifth of disembarkations from British transatlantic slave ships occurred in ports outside the British Empire. Moreover, large numbers of Africans who did land in British territory were quickly sold on to other jurisdictions after their transatlantic passage. Adjusting for these patterns drastically changes our view of the dominant slaving power as the Industrial Revolution unfolded. As Table 2.4 makes clear, the largest markets for slaves in the Americas were never British, or indeed French, but were always Brazilian and Spanish American. As argued in Chapter 2, it is likely that the total colonial output of both these regions always greatly exceeded that of Jamaica or St. Domingue, and for most years was greater than the combined total of these two colonies.Footnote ¹¹³

There is, however, a more fundamental flaw in SCIR. The body of the text is a 216-page catalogue of what reads like all possible connections between individual slave traders and their businesses on the one hand, and the economy that lay beyond the slave trade on the other. The list must be by far the most complete ever assembled. Example is piled on example. but it is essentially descriptive and is in line with the numerous essay-length studies on Dutch involvement in the business that have appeared recently.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Despite the title of SCIR and the strong economic history background of its two authors, their book has a startling lack of analysis. All studies that track slave-trader interactions with the rest of the economy make the implicit assumption that without the slave trade the resources in the contact industry, for example, textiles, would have sat idle. Prices, however, would have adjusted, and many textiles would have found alternative buyers.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Sixty years ago, Robert W. Fogel set out to answer an equally large question.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Faced with generations of historians who had stressed the crucial contribution of the railroads to US economic growth, he determined to find just how big this contribution might be. Almost all historians ignore market adjustments in the allocation of resources that would have occurred if an industry or an innovation had not existed. Few of them engage with the concept of value added, which forms the core of modern National Income accounting. Using extensive data collection and large numbers of simultaneous equations, Fogel’s answer was that in 1900 without railroads, US GNP would have been just 5 percent below the actual figure. Resources would have moved into the canal sector, among others, thus ensuring that railroads had only a modest impact on the economy. But Fogel’s key finding was that in a modern economy, no single innovation or industry is going to have a large impact. There is no room for such a conclusion in SCIR. Even though Britain never had the largest slave empire and even though the Iberian powers clearly did, but never showed traces of industrialization, the authors are certain that their long list of descriptive links between the slave sector and the rest of the economy is evidence of slavery triggering accelerating economic growth first in Britain.

But the most dramatic indication of the triviality of the slave trade to the economy of any given port comes from Liverpool. In 1799 and 1800, more slave-trading ventures left this port than any other in history. In 1799, the busiest slave-trading year experienced by any single Atlantic port, a slaving voyage left Liverpool every three days. Because we also have a good idea of the Atlantic total traffic in these years, we can say that Liverpool’s 267 slaving ventures accounted for almost half the transatlantic slave traffic from all Atlantic ports combined. This is an extraordinary ratio, and we can add tonnage data. TSTD tells us that Liverpool slave vessels averaged 155 tons in 1799–1800. Over two years the gross tonnage of Liverpool’s slave-trading fleet at its all-time peak was thus 41,385. How does this compare with other shipping leaving Liverpool in these years? A well-known commercial dictionary of the time provides the answer. A total of 9,264 voyages paid dock duties in 1799–1800 on vessels which had a total tonnage of 878,382. Therefore, slave-trading ventures leaving Liverpool at a time when the port accounted for nearly half the total Atlantic slave trade accounted for 2.9 percent of total shipping and 4.7 percent of total shipping tonnage. At most other times, for example in peacetime, these ratios would have been very much smaller again.Footnote ¹¹⁷

We also have close to complete data on the ownership of slave-trading voyages departing from Liverpool. We know that 950 persons took an equity interest in at least one voyage leaving the port between 1779 and 1807, years when industrialization was well underway. As already noted, very few of this group invested in the slave trade alone – perhaps no more than thirty. Involvement in the slave trade must have accounted for a tiny fraction of total wealth in the county of Lancashire where both Liverpool and much of the early English Industrial Revolution were located. By 1750 Liverpool had grown from a seventeenth-century fishing village to the fourth largest city in England but given the above data, the slave trade by itself cannot have been the primary cause. More likely candidates are the port’s trading links with Ireland and the Americas broadly defined. Moreover, the port’s most dramatic expansion occurred after the slave trade ended. When the slave trade was close to its peak Thomas Clarkson researched the port’s economy (1788–1789). He found that the diversity of Liverpool’s economy was such that it would comfortably survive abolition, and of course he was correct in that by 1851 Liverpool had become the second largest English city despite the ending of the slave trade. Later in the century, no less than 40 percent of all global trade passed through the port.Footnote ¹¹⁸ A few years after Clarkson’s assessment, future Lord Chancellor Henry Brougham correctly forecast that “the various other branches of our foreign commerce which are understocked with capital would afford a ready and profitable employment for the small pittance thrown out of the slave trade.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Thirty years after British abolition of the slave trade, dock duties in Liverpool were paid by 15,038 vessels with a combined tonnage of almost 2 million (1837). Clarkson and Brougham were proved correct. If the slave trade had never existed, then income, employment, or any indicator of human welfare in Liverpool or England could not have been much different to the historical reality.Footnote ¹²⁰

But what about the countries apart from Britain? Excluding the Brazilian-based traffic, Portugal was not one of the region’s major slave-trading countries after 1640, but it is worth noting that despite a near monopoly of the trade between Europe and Africa in the very early period, as early as 1520 the revenues of the Lisbon slave house and the Lisbon Guinea house were already falling behind the value of the traffic in gold from Mina in Africa, as well as the East Indian trade.Footnote ¹²¹ The country’s participation in the massive Spanish American project modifies this picture. Down to 1640 we have records of 308 voyages leaving Portugal carrying off 108,000 slaves, but again the annual average of departures during the sixty years of the union of the two crowns was small. It may also, of course, be incomplete.Footnote ¹²² The Spanish and Portuguese Americas cumulatively produced far more exports by value than did their English-speaking counterparts. The importance of Iberian colonial exports to their respective metropolitan economies was far greater than were the British plantation economies to Britain.Footnote ¹²³ In the final analysis, all scholars who see slavery as the foundation of quickening growth in the metropole must deal with the Portuguese case. A recent study of that nation’s economy during the whole era of the slave trade, 1527 to 1850, generates striking results fatal to the argument that slavery enabled industrial capitalism. Portugal had the smallest population of all west European colonial nations, and thus in per capita terms was the nation with the largest potential per capita gains from slavery and its overseas riches. For more than three centuries Portugal was the leading Atlantic slave trader and, at least until 1825 when Brazil became independent, the possessor of the largest single source of plantation produce in the early modern Atlantic world. By 1750 Portuguese per capita GDP was high by European standards, though still significantly below British and Dutch levels. In the following century the volume of its slave trade and the value of Brazilian coffee exports increased to their greatest ever levels. What happened to per capita GDP in the face of these colonial activities? According to Palma and Reis in a statement surely fatal to those seeing links between slavery and economic growth:

Today, Portugal is the poorest country in the EU, despite Portuguese pre-eminence in the Atlantic slave trades. And income levels in its larger Iberian neighbor have always lagged those of Britain, France, and Germany despite its colonies for over three centuries absorbing far more slaves who produced far higher value exports than did its competitors. Major European countries such as Germany and Italy attained developed status without any large-scale dependence on coerced labor; outside Europe, Japan and South Korea likewise. Of the two major modern economic powers slavery was significant in the history of one – the US – and insignificant to the history of the other – China. But in the US case what does “significant” mean? For every enslaved person arriving in North America, seventeen arrived in the Iberian Americas. Moreover, slavery started earlier and lasted longer in the latter. Thanks to natural population growth the US slave population became the largest in the Americas, but colonial North America experienced strong economic growth before the slave labor force became significant (slaves comprised just 6 percent of the total population in 1776) and the US economy grew most rapidly after slavery was abolished eighty-seven years later.

Of the three northwestern European intruders in the Iberian Atlantic, historians have paid least attention to the economic impact of slavery on France. St. Domingue produced more sugar, rum, coffee, cotton, and indigo than the combined British Caribbean in the second half of the eighteenth century. But the French economy was much larger and, in any event, data for the late eighteenth century is not yet available.Footnote ¹²⁵ But we do know that the British invaded St. Domingue in 1793 not to free slaves or end the slave trade but to incorporate the richest colony in the world into their own imperial system. This motivation also lay behind Napoleon’s invasion in 1802. It is striking that reviews of the condition of the French economy in the late eighteenth century take no account of the loss of most of the French American colonial empire, the demise of which apparently had no effect on Napoleon’s capacity to wage almost two decades of war on the rest of Europe. The most rapid industrialization of France before the twentieth century occurred in the 1850s and 1860s after slavery was abolished. For all its preeminence in the annals of slavery in the Americas, the rise and sudden fall of the St. Domingue slave economy, the largest in the plantation Americas, was apparently of small import to metropolitan France, including those Atlantic ports with the closest ties to the colony.

Similarly, the economy of the Netherlands grew very slowly in the second half of the eighteenth century. Historians have been misled by the fact that in this same period the Atlantic share of this trade increased as consumers bought more sugar, coffee, tobacco, and other plantation products.Footnote ¹²⁶ In the 1770s the value of Dutch Atlantic imports surpassed the value of Asian imports even though Surinam plantations were not doing well at this time.Footnote ¹²⁷ This development could not stave off an eighteenth-century decline of the Dutch economy relative to its neighbors, nor permit the Netherlands to experience industrialization ahead of the British. Eventually, the country “joined modern western industrial progress after 1860” about the same time as France, and, we might add, about the same time as the abolition of slavery in both countries.Footnote ¹²⁸

Too many regions have enforced the most exploitative forms of slavery for long periods of time without developing industrial capitalism, and too many others developed industrial capitalism without chattel slavery. Whatever the explanation for Britain’s rise to prosperity and global power in the nineteenth century, slavery cannot have featured as one of the essential explanatory factors. Most economic historians would agree with Eric Hilt that:

Slavery and the slave trade could have triggered accelerated economic growth at the imperial center only if there had been social and economic structures within the imperial power that were able to use colonial growth to make the transition to industrialization. It is these domestic patterns to which the historians of slavery need to direct their attention. To return to the larger argument, the human capital, especially maritime skills, plus the financial intermediaries and services that evolved in London, Amsterdam, and later, Nantes, allowed the northwestern nations to break into the slave trade, but these were not sufficient to displace the Portuguese and Spanish in the Atlantic world. A dispassionate look at the development paths of these five Western European nations suggests that successful participation in the slave trade and, beyond that, slavery in the Americas, was in no way a prerequisite of the sustained and permanent economic growth of Western Europe. What was a prerequisite were the institutions generated by the early modern economic growth of northwestern Europe that allowed the region to draw on expanding overseas trade. First causes were thus the domestic changes that enabled the economy to benefit from expanding trade.