Slave Trade Triangle

New World Colonies

For the best part of forty years following the catastrophe of Hawkins’ third triangular slavery voyage to the West Indies in the late-1560s, England limited its overseas commercial activity to trading goods directly to and from Africa and the West Indies. England at that time had no colonies, nor participated in the slave trade to any significant extent.

That situation changed from the early years of the seventeenth century when English colonies were established in the New World. The first English colony in the region was formed in Virginia in 1607, and a second on mainland America was established in New England in 1620. However, it was not these colonies that brought England back into the slave trade. Tobacco plantations in Virginia and Maryland during the seventeenth century employed white indentured labour taken from the various English under-classes and who over a period of time earned their freedom. Rather, it was England’s expansion into the Caribbean and the international sugar market.

Bermuda was colonised in 1612, St Kitts in 1624 and Barbados in 1625. Antigua, the Leeward Islands, Nevis and Montserrat followed during the 1630s, whilst Jamaica was taken from Spain in 1655. Decimated indigenous populations meant that outside labour had to be brought in to work the growing number of sugar plantations that in turn were needed to supply an ever-increasing European demand, as unsweetened tea, coffee and chocolate became more widely available. For a solution to its labour problem, plantation owners looked to Africa, and England re-entered the slave trade with a vengeance.

At the same time as England was colonising the West Indies it was establishing trading posts along the coast of West Africa; in time they built or took over about sixty, from present-day Senegal in the north to the Camaroons in the south. These trading posts were fortified and became holding places, or factories, for processing slaves. Slaves were taken from the African interior by other African tribes, traded with the English for arms, metalware and other consumer goods, and then shipped to the West Indies.

Slaving brought the English into direct competition against Dutch traders who had become since the early seventeenth century Europe’s foremost slavers, having been granted Spain’s Asiento, succeeding Portugal, in 1621. To protect its own market, Parliament introduced Navigation Acts in 1651 and 1660. Essentially, under these Acts foreign ships were banned from importing and exporting goods into and out of English colonies. With Dutch traders excluded from English colonies, it was England that became the great slave-trading nation from the mid-seventeenth century.

Coinciding with the introduction of the Navigation Acts, American tobacco plantations changed their means of production. By the 1660s, plantation owners could no longer rely on the supply from England of white indentured labour, and they too turned to Africa. Virginia and Maryland proceeded to implement various Slave Codes, identifying the small number of Africans already in America as slaves rather than servants, and relied on English ships to deliver their new enslaved workforce.

In 1660 the Company of Royal Adventures Trading into Africa received its Royal Charter, and on 10 January 1663 the Company was incorporated. Major backers included King Charles II and other members of the royal family and London society. The Company’s principal concern in Africa was gold. To raise the profile of the Company, newly minted gold coins were stamped with an image of an elephant and called ‘Guineas’. Despite the gold, the Company went bust, to be succeeded in 1672 by the Royal African Company (RAC), again with royal investment, particularly from the Duke of York, later King James II.

Under the terms of its Charter, the RAC maintained and governed the fortified trading posts in Africa in return for sole trading rights. Trade included slaves, and so it was that London became, for the time being at least, the centre of England’s slave trading. By 1689 London shipping had transported 89,000 slaves from Africa to the West Indies and the American colonies. John Barbot, a Frenchman, wrote an account of the internal African slave trade in 1682, describing how slaves were acquired by other African tribes before being sold on to English traders:

Although the RAC in London enjoyed a monopoly, traders in other English ports, particularly Bristol and Liverpool, which had the advantage over London of facing the Atlantic, recognised its huge worth and they too wanted to enter the slave trade (although unofficial ‘interlopers’ or rogue traders had been operating out of these ports despite the RAC’s monopoly). Under pressure, the RAC’s monopoly was lifted in 1698, with private ships from other ports trading into and out of Africa then having to pay a levy under the terms of the Ten Per Cent Act. Thus, they became known as ‘ten-percenters’. From then and over the following decade, the number of slaves transported each year rose from an average of 5,000 to 10,000, with privateers carrying some eighty per cent.

Learn more about slavery and abolition and the Plymouth connection:

John Hawkins

Slave Trade Triangle

Abolition

Conclusion

Glossary

Suggested reading

Slavery and abolition web links