For decades, historians of the British Atlantic slave trade have noted the paradox that just as ideas of “English liberties” became central to British political identity, colonial slavery and Britain's dominance of the slave trade expanded exponentially. But few have attempted to explore this contradiction. William Pettigrew's book is a bold attempt to address this by focusing on the politics of Britain's participation in the transatlantic slave trade. It examines the role that the Royal African Company and its detractors played in politicizing the slave trade through public debate and political lobbying during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This important book connects the history of British involvement in the slave trade and debates over how it should be managed to the ideological disputes that shaped early modern English politics. Did the crown have the authority to grant a monopoly over a particular trade or did subjects have the right to trade without such interference? The company, founded in 1672 by a royal charter with a monopoly on all trade to and from West Africa, certainly thought the crown had such authority. Its enemies, however, argued that monopoly limited who could participate in the trade and was inherently un-English. For these independent merchants, freedom to trade in enslaved Africans was a natural right.

After the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, the Royal African Company was no longer guaranteed its monopoly privileges. While the company attempted to get its monopoly reaffirmed by Parliament during the 1690s and early 1700s, independent traders successfully lobbied to make sure this did not happen by strategizing for what Pettigrew calls a “legislative vacuum.” In other words, the company's enemies hoped for, and eventually achieved, total deregulation of the slave trade through a lack of parliamentary legislation by 1712. Pettigrew investigates who the independent merchants were and how they mobilized to keep the slave trade open after 1688. He persuasively argues that independent slave traders were able to achieve their ends because they better understood the political environment created by the Glorious Revolution. In mobilizing petitions and pamphlets, these slave traders cultivated important political alliances with powerful men in Parliament and the Board of Trade. By focusing on deregulation, independent merchants demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of the new political environment. Pettigrew argues convincingly that the success of independent slave traders reflected the rising importance of Atlantic interests in British politics in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution.

The Royal African Company, on the other hand, was never able to compete commercially or maneuver itself politically in this new environment. Just as it lost unrecoverable market share, the company proved unable to adapt to the new political age and constantly played catch-up in terms of lobbying and pamphleteering. Although Pettigrew is right to criticize scholars who have overemphasized the company's financial troubles as inevitable, he is perhaps too quick to dismiss attempts on the part of the company to petition Parliament or publish pamphlets after 1688. Hiring such adept political writers as Charles Davenant and Daniel Defoe to promote its position indicates a certain level of understanding of the art of political persuasion on the part of the company. While it is true that the company solicited fewer petitions than the independent merchants and that its petitions often contained prewritten preambles, this did not necessarily demonstrate that the company's strategies were any less calculated than those of its enemies. Sending out prewritten petitions might have indicated a centralized effort to solicit support. But the success of the independent traders in mobilizing popular support for an open slave trade is certainly beyond dispute.

There is a longer history to the development of the ideological positions and political strategies of both the Royal African Company and independent traders than Pettigrew considers, dating from at least the company's founding in 1672. Long before 1688, colonial planters and independent merchants emphasized their perceived natural right to trade, especially for unfree labor, just as the crown and company attempted to restrict trade and limit these dissenting voices as part of a broader imperial strategy of centralization and control. Some readers might also be surprised that party politics plays such a small role in Pettigrew's political history of the slave trade. Although he is right to point out that political labels were fluid and that Whigs and Tories could be found on both sides of the slave trade debates, the long-term success of the independent traders had a lot to do with strategic political alliances, such as with the Whig-dominated Board of Trade. These reservations aside, Pettigrew's assessment of the ability of independent merchants to navigate the political situation after 1688 is compelling.

The final two chapters focus on how the company attempted to keep itself relevant after deregulation. In addition to its well-known alliance with the South Sea Company to manage the asiento trade, there were plans to develop trade in the interior of Africa and to establish indigo plantations on the West African coast. None of these schemes brought any sustained commercial or political success, however. Pettigrew's final chapter explores how in the wake of these financial disasters, the company laid some of the ideological foundations for antislavery sentiment by the late 1700s. He argues that ideas about the importance of a monopoly for conducting a well-regulated trade evolved into arguments against the unfettered avarice of independent slave traders, whom the company portrayed as barbaric economic actors. By the 1730s, the company no longer supported slavery or the slave trade at all. This seems to be a remarkable development, one that Pettigrew maintains occurred because the commercial success of the independent traders had simply pushed the company out of the slave trade. But surely there was a political side of this story as well, one worth exploring in a more sustained way. Despite these minor criticisms, Pettigrew's book is a welcome and important contribution to the study of the politics of slavery in the early modern British Atlantic world. It goes a long way toward explaining how and why British dominance of the slave trade was intimately connected to political and constitutional changes in early modern Britain. Historians of the transatlantic slave trade, Atlantic history, and early modern British politics have much to learn from Pettigrew's scholarship.