The Royal African Company, chartered by King Charles II (1660-85) in 1672, held the monopoly on England’s slave traffic until 1698. Beginning in the late 1500s, a few English vessels had trafficked in slave cargo. However, England was a latecomer to the slave trade, which had been dominated by Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, and Danish importers. The first British experience with African slaves in its home territory occurred when colonists in Jamestown, Virginia, bought a few “negars” from a Dutch trading ship in 1619. The English colonies’ involvement in slavery was then haphazard until 1663, when Charles II, the restored Stuart king, chartered the Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa. The company floundered during the English-Dutch wars and was then replaced by the Royal African Company, which established forts along the coast of West Africa from which to launch raids upon or trade with local Africans to procure slaves. The company’s center was on the Gold Coast at Cape Coast Castle. Though slaves were landed at several colonial ports in the Americas, the company concentrated its efforts on Jamaica and other British-controlled West Indian islands, sending an estimated yearly average of more than 100 ships carrying as many as 400 slaves each. In 1698 English merchants pressured Parliament to throw open the slave trade to individual entrepreneurs, ending the Royal African Company’s monopoly. In 1731 the Royal African Company discontinued the commerce in slaves, replacing it with trade in ivory and gold, thereby avoiding the risk of having the cargo resist, fall ill, or die.
In 1750 Parliament replaced the Royal African Company with the nonmonopolistic Company of Merchants Trading to Africa. The new company was not allowed to trade in slaves. Instead, it facilitated England’s African trade by maintaining coastal relations through the administration of a series of forts along the coast. This company lasted for 14 years after England abolished its slave trade in 1807.
Further reading: K. G. Davies, The Royal African Company (New York: Atheneum, 1970).
—Emma Lapsansky and Ty M. Reese
World History
