During the seventeenth century, British merchants shipped approximately 400,000 enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. This trade was mainly orchestrated from London and dominated by the Royal African Company (RAC). In the next hundred years, the number of captives traded was over 2.5 million, while Liverpool and Bristol overtook London as the new organizational hubs in Britain. Nicholas Radburn’s book explains how this expansion happened and what it meant for the people involved, not ably the enslaved. Adopting an intercontinental approach and grounded in meticulous archival research, this is without question the most comprehensive account of the transatlantic slave trade from a British perspective currently available. Radburn’s main argument is that several fundamental innovations underpinned Britain’s growing slave trade after 1700.
The first innovation was the entry of a new group of British merchants into the slaving business, people of relatively humble backgrounds who were willing to invest their capital in what many considered a high-risk but potentially high-reward trade. These were often young family firms, led by men who were descended from farmers or tradesmen and had moved from the countryside to west coast outports to participate in Britain’s burgeoning Atlantic trade in sugar and tobacco, from where they moved into the slave trade. In Africa, they outmanoeuvred the RAC by finding new markets where captives could be purchased more cheaply. At home, they invested in port infrastructure and created joint ventures for the manufacture of African trade goods, particularly guns and gunpowder.
Their African trading partners were equally innovative. In response to growing European demand for captives, broker communities such as the Fante on the Gold Coast or the Efik and Ibani in the Bight of Biafra transformed their coastal villages into well-functioning slave markets, expanded the production of vital subsistence crops such as maize and yam, and contributed to building new commercial infrastructure in the interior, often violently removing competitor networks.
On the African coast, the process of trading people became increasingly standardized, as European traders ruthlessly sifted and sorted African captives according to age, sex and health, while sequencing their purchasing of men, women and children to reduce both costs and the chance of shipboard revolts. Simultaneously, another process of sorting took place as African brokers demanded an increasing variety of trade goods in exchange for captives, initially to curtail the inflation caused by trading captives for single currencies such as manillas, cowries or iron bars. To facilitate transactions, Africans and Europeans agreed on the prices for captives using imaginary units of account, which they subsequently converted into variable assortments of goods.
Slave traders also introduced significant changes to their ships to decrease the risks of mortality and resistance, allowing them to carry more captives across the Atlantic. Following the Dutch example, they redesigned the ship’s interior to improve the flow of air below deck. Meanwhile, above deck, they looked at ships of war and installed bulkheads and barricades that, alongside deck chains and nettings around the ship’s sides, reduced the chance of revolt or escape. This allowed crews to bring the captives up during the day, taking them out of the cramped and unhealthy spaces below. Consequently, shipboard mortality dropped by a quarter, although the common practice of ‘tight packing’ still caused significant death and disease.
Finally, on the American side of the Atlantic, Radburn highlights two further innovations. The first was the growing importance of ‘Guinea factors’, brokers who organized the sale of enslaved Africans, collected market information for merchants and captains, and provided loans to buyers, thus assuming colonial debts on behalf of slave traders. Like the latter, they were often marginal men with a background in the bilateral trade with Europe who hoped to increase their fortunes through participation in the slave trade. They were also responsible for implementing a new sales method designed by the RAC in the late seventeenth century; this replaced slave purchasing in ‘lots’ with the acquisition of individual captives, thus allowing wealthy planters to quickly scoop up the healthiest adult males. As with his discussion of sorting goods and people in Africa, Radburn devotes considerable space to explaining how age, sex and health determined the trajectories of enslaved Africans in the Americas, where the sales process and the onward journey of captives could last over a month.
This book is a must-read in Atlantic history. Certainly, for experts in British, African or Caribbean history – or in the slave trade, for that matter – some of the material will sound familiar. Historians of the South Atlantic may wonder how the older and larger Iberian slave trade shaped, or was modified by, the changes British merchants introduced during the eighteenth century. But the novelty of the work is primarily its integrated approach, as Radburn applies a deep knowledge of British trade records to a synthesis of historical scholarship on different parts of the Atlantic. By doing so, he has been able to analyse in painful detail the horrifying process of commodification that most readers intuitively associate with the transatlantic slave trade. At the same time, he demonstrates that slave traders could not erase the human agency of the enslaved, which becomes especially clear in his discussion of the barricado – for this reader, one of the book’s highlights. To improve the survival rate of people whom merchants uncaringly considered perishable goods, it was necessary to erect a defensive structure that prevented captives from revolting against their commodification.
