Freedom's Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672-1752

by William A. Pettigrew

Overview

In the years following the Glorious Revolution, independent slave traders challenged the charter of the Royal African Company by asserting their natural rights as Britons to trade freely in enslaved Africans. In this comprehensive history of the rise and fall of the RAC, William A. Pettigrew grounds the transatlantic slave trade in politics, not economic forces, analyzing the ideological arguments of the RAC and its opponents in Parliament and in public debate. Ultimately, Pettigrew powerfully reasons that freedom became the rallying cry for those who wished to participate in the slave trade and therefore bolstered the expansion of the largest intercontinental forced migration in history.
Unlike previous histories of the RAC, Pettigrew’s study pursues the Company’s story beyond the trade’s complete deregulation in 1712 to its demise in 1752. Opening the trade led to its escalation, which provided a reliable supply of enslaved Africans to the mainland American colonies, thus playing a critical part in entrenching African slavery as the colonies' preferred solution to the American problem of labor supply.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469611822
Publisher:	Omohundro Institute and UNC Press
Publication date:	12/30/2013
Series:	Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

William A. Pettigrew is lecturer in history at the University of Kent.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations and Tables ix

Prologue: "This African Monster" 1

Part 1 Deregulation, 1672-1712

1 The Politics of Slave-Trade Escalation, 1672-1712 11

2 The Interests: "A Well-Governed Army of Veteran Troops" versus "an Undefinable Heteroclite Body" of "Pirates" and "Buccaneers" 45

3 The Ideas: Challenging the "Tales of… Mandevil" 83

4 The Strategies: "As Witches Do the Devil" 115

Part 2 Re-regulation, 1712-1752

5 The Outcomes: Tropical Burlesques 153

6 The Legacies: Free to Enslave 179

Epilogue: Confused Commemorations 211

Appendix 1 Data Supplements for Annual Slave-Trading Voyages, 1672-1752 219

Appendix 2 A Directory of Independent Slave Traders, 1672-1712 227

Appendix 3 A Directory of Lobbying Independent Traders, 1678-1713 235

Appendix 4 A Directory of Royal African Company Directors, 1672-1750 237

Appendix 5 Africa Trade Petitions to Parliament on the Royal African Company's Monopoly, 1690-1752 240

Acknowledgments 247

Index 249

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“For the first time, the origins of the British slave trade receive the searching inquiry they long have deserved. With Freedom’s Debt, Pettigrew tells a new story about the political foundations of the traffic as well as the ideological seeds of its dissolution.” — Christopher Leslie Brown, Columbia University

“Pettigrew powerfully demonstrates the importance of both political contestation and capitalist disagreements in the emergence of the transatlantic slave trade. In so doing, he skillfully shifts our focus from the heroic story of abolition to an earlier, more political account of the origins of the slave trade itself and the subsequent move to abolish it.” — Steve Pincus, Yale University

Editorial Reviews

“Well researched and coherently organized...convincing, compelling, and important...Freedom’s Debt does for English history something like what Edmund S. Morgan did for American history in American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia” — William and Mary Quarterly

“Pettigrew’s fascinating and well-researched book is an essential contribution to the history of the Anglo-American slave trade.” — Journal of Early American History

“Accessible and very interesting. . . . An admirable account of how the [Royal African Company] and its rival British slave-trading enterprises shaped, and were shaped by, the politics of the wider society they inhabited.” — Enterprise & Society

“Pettigrew’s work is a much needed examination of the political and economic underpinnings of the early years of the British slave trade.” — History Today

“[A] carefully researched book.” — Journal of American History

“[Freedom’s Debt] will be a standard source for specialists for many years to come.” — Journal of Interdisciplinary History

“A deeply researched, persuasive study on the political disputes between the RAC and what the author calls the independent slave traders who opposed the RAC’s monopoly and were victorious by 1712 in deregulating Britain’s slave trade.” — H-Net

“Cogently argued.” — Jrnl of Southern History

From the Publisher