When news of Humphry Morice’s death by suicide reached Annamaboe, on the coast of modern Ghana, in March of 1732, the world’s most prolific private slave trader had been dead for 5 months. His final years had been full of ignominy. He had defrauded the Bank of England of £29,000. He had misappropriated £16,500 from his five daughters. His financing of 103 slaving voyages to Africa beginning in 1704—trafficking 30,000 people across the Atlantic in under 30 years—however, had gained him the esteem of the London merchant community. He was elected Bank of England Governor by that group in 1727.

This character and his role in transforming the slave trade into an efficient and devastatingly effective private enterprise is the subject of The Prince of Slavers, by Matthew David Mitchell. The book traces the emergence of Morice’s innovative multi-ship system, the strategy he devised to figure out consumer demand in Africa in an efficient way that overcame the fort-based system that the Royal African Company had used to their advantage since the seventeenth century.

Drawing on the Bank of England’s holdings of Morice’s papers—some digitized by Adam Matthew Publications since 2000, and the remainder at the Bank’s Threadneedle archives—Mitchell’s book is the first dedicated to tracing the history of Morice’s rise and fall. And it is a story that will be familiar to historians of business innovation in far more conventional firms: Morice’s early innovations gave way “to stagnation, which then allowed other innovators from Bristol and the Netherlands to overtake him” with even more efficient undercutting (p. 4).

Mitchell positions his biographical study firmly within the historiographies of British imperial capitalism and the more recent histories of slavery and capitalism. He is interested in the role that Morice’s business played in bridging the era of joint-stock company monopolies and the era of free trade. Mitchell argues that “one must understand Morice” to understand the evolution of Britain’s dominance of the slave trade, “given that his career occupied the crucial transition period between the end of the Royal African Company monopoly in 1698 and the rise of the slavers from Bristol and Liverpool who would… drive it to its highest volumes in the late eighteenth century” (p. 4).

The book follows a straightforward chronological narrative, closely following the rich archival record, beginning with the era of the Royal African Company and proceeding through the emergence of the separate traders after 1698, Morice’s start, the peak of his career, and how his business interests collapsed around him. For business historians looking for details on specific transactions, the book includes a helpful annotated list of Morice’s African Voyages.

For those looking to understand the early origins of global capitalism, and how individuals sought to overcome the risks associated with it without the protection of a state-backed joint-stock monopoly, Morice’s story offers an interesting case. Morice “correctly realized that the key to limiting the risks of the slave trade was to bring the best possible assortment of goods to trade in West Africa, which in turn required him to devise an affordable way of obtaining information on what African consumers wanted to buy” (p. 225). Initially, he proposed faster information, rather than a monopoly on information. His multi-ship innovation worked “by having his ship captains rendezvous and trade amongst themselves” so that he could “have one proceed across the Atlantic with a full cargo of slaves,” while the second ship returned directly to London “with timely information on African consumer demand” (p. 125). He then used links to clothiers and dyers in London, “as well as to Dutch financial services” to deliver “the right goods to the right African consumer markets at the right price” (p. 126). Ultimately, Morice did try to expand his advantage in information speed into an advantage based on a monopoly; by 1730, “Morice was putting more ships, more cargo, and more capital into his trade with Africa than it could bear” (p. 193).

The Bristol-based competitors who ultimately ousted him were not able to do so purely by speed of information; they had to look to new markets—in the Bight of Biafra—and, crucially, new financing facilities for the colonists in the West Indies whose reliance on credit helped to fuel the spiraling demand for enslaved people and the sugar they were producing in the second half of the eighteenth century.

The book makes a clear and compelling argument about the causes of Morice’s rise and fall, and about the broader implications of that story for understanding this period in the history of British capitalism; Morice’s attempts to translate his mercantile success into gentlemanly trappings—for himself and his son—would be recognizable to readers of Cain and Hopkins’s classic theory of “gentlemanly capitalism,” British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688–1914 (1993). The book also never loses sight of the nature of the business that Morice was so successful in transforming. Mitchell’s attention to the human cost of the slave trade makes clear that “business innovation” is not an achievement that can be separated from the underlying morality of the business being innovated, even if Morice’s contemporaries would have disagreed.