The Outgoings and Incomings of the Royal African Company
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Kent Academic Repository Full text document (pdf) Citation for published version Horrigan, Liam Francis (2016) Settling the Trade to Africa: The Anglo-African Trade, 1695-1715, and the Political and Economic Implications of 1698. Master of Arts by Research (MARes) thesis, University of Kent,. DOI Link to record in KAR https://kar.kent.ac.uk/59306/ Document Version UNSPECIFIED Copyright & reuse Content in the Kent Academic Repository is made available for research purposes. Unless otherwise stated all content is protected by copyright and in the absence of an open licence (eg Creative Commons), permissions for further reuse of content should be sought from the publisher, author or other copyright holder. Versions of research The version in the Kent Academic Repository may differ from the final published version. Users are advised to check http://kar.kent.ac.uk for the status of the paper. Users should always cite the published version of record. Enquiries For any further enquiries regarding the licence status of this document, please contact: [email protected] If you believe this document infringes copyright then please contact the KAR admin team with the take-down information provided at http://kar.kent.ac.uk/contact.html 1 Settling the Trade to Africa: The Anglo-African Trade, 1695-1715, and the Political and Economic Implications of 1698 Liam Francis Horrigan MA-Res History [email protected] University of Kent, 2015 Student No: 14903926 Submission: 18/09/2015 Word Count: 29,997 2 Contents Acknowledgements 3 List of Figures 4 Introduction: Settling the Trade to Africa 5 I - Back and Forth: The Outgoings and Incomings of the Royal African Company 14 II – Traders and their Trades 1698 and the African Trade Debates 26 Partners in Trade: The Royal African Company and Separate Traders 37 Commercial Collaboration in the World’s Wealth of Goods 47 III – The Political and Imperial Agenda The Anglo-African commercial relationship in England and Africa 69 Forts Factories and Settlements of the RAC 80 Conclusion 95 Appendices 97 Bibliography 107 3 Acknowledgements This work would not have been at all possible without the continuing assistance and support of numerous people, and I’d like to take a brief moment to thank them. First and foremost, I must show my greatest thanks to Dr William Pettigrew, for his constant guidance throughout my writing of this thesis from day one. Further to this, I would like to thank the research team that I have worked with for the past year; Dr Liam Haydon, Dr Tristan Stein, Aske Brock and Haig Smith. Their consideration of my ongoing work has been incredibly helpful. Particular thanks are needed for Aske, whom was far too patient with me in my trepidation regarding spreadsheets. I would also like to thank Thomas Arney, whose advice and assistance regarding map construction I could not have been without. Additionally, Andy Beesley has been a constant source of encouragement throughout this process, for which I must give thanks. Finally, I cannot be grateful enough to Eleanor Hicks for her undying support, and the reminders that every issue can be worked out when given enough time. There have been many institutions to which I must also give mention. Of course, the University of Kent’s History department, as well as library and maintenance staff have all played their part in the writing of this thesis – thank you to them. Thanks too, to the University of Birmingham for their allowing me to access their library’s documents. I must also voice my gratitude to the good people at the British Library and the National Archives, where I spent considerable months of my time compiling my work. 4 List of Figures Figure 1: The number of voyages recorded in the Outgoings per annum. 17 Figure 2: The total value of cargoes recorded in the Outgoings per annum. 17 Figure 3: Ownership of cargo aboard each voyage per annum, Representing Separate Traders (ST), Royal African Company (RAC) and both together. 40 Figure 4: The percentages of ownership of cargo for each voyage per annum. 40 Figure 5: The percentages of voyages containing goods by their regional origin per annum, 1702- 1706. 52 Figure 6: The percentages of voyages containing goods by their regional origin per annum, 1707-1712 52 Figure 7: The ownership of cargoes aboard the voyages, and the percentage of goods and their origins contained therein, 1702 55 Figure 8: The ownership of cargoes aboard the voyages, and the percentage of goods and their origins contained therein, 1703 55 Figure 9: The ownership of cargoes aboard the voyages, and the percentage of goods and their origins contained therein, 1704 55 Figure 10: The ownership of cargoes aboard the voyages, and the percentage of goods and their origins contained therein, 1706 56 Figure 11: The ownership of cargoes aboard the voyages, and the percentage of goods and their origins contained therein, 1708 56 Figure 12: Tons of redwood traded per annum aboard vessels engaging in bilateral, and triangular Anglo-African commerce. 60 Figure 13: A map of the East Indies denoting the points of origin of a selection of goods listed amongst the cargoes of the Outgoings. 65 Figure 14: A map of Europe denoting the points of origin of a selection of goods listed amongst the cargoes of the Outgoings. 66 Figure 15: A map of the Americas denoting the points of origin of a selection of goods listed amongst the cargoes of the Outgoings. 67 Figure 16: A map of the British Isles denoting the points of origin of a selection of goods listed amongst the cargoes of the Outgoings. 68 Figure 17: Table illustrating the percentage of draperies, old and new, amongst the voyages to West Africa per annum. 74 Figure 18: Percentage of draperies, old and new, amongst the voyages to West Africa per annum. 74 5 Settling the Trade to Africa At the turn of the eighteenth century, in 1698, the English Parliament passed An Act to Settle the Trade to Africa. When coming into effect a year later, it was to allow hundreds of merchants legal access to engage in trade to and from West Africa. Only a decade previously, traders whom had attempted to engage in such commercial activity outside the confines of the Royal African Company (the RAC) were subject to draconian legal action which effectively branded them as pirates.1 It was common practice in the 1680s for the RAC to “have by vertue of his Maj’ties Charter...a Commission to Seize Interlopers”, their cargoes and their vessels when caught engaging in an illicit trade Anglo- African trade.2 Frequently referenced by historians as the beginning of an open trade, with merchants flooding to the West African coast, 1698 was the catalyst for the beginning of a huge increase in the numbers of enslaved Africans shipped across the Atlantic over the eighteenth century. 3 With commercial competition to these ‘separate traders’ unmatched by any chartered monopoly company, historians have also marked this as the endpoint for not just the RAC but all European chartered companies trading to Africa.4 Yet it is the seemingly inseparable nature of these two entities – the Atlantic slave trade and the Royal African Company – that has hindered historians from looking at the bigger picture surrounding 1698. Dominated by the loud, boisterous pamphlets which circulated London, the nation as a whole and the Atlantic colonies in the 1690s and early 1700s, historians even recently have been too quick to label the intended ideological opposition between separate traders and monopolists from contemporary literature. Written by the likes of Charles Davenant and Daniel Defoe as well as dozens of anonymous pamphleteers, these works on the state of Anglo-African trade were not representative of the commercial interactions that existed between separate traders and the RAC. Their rhetorical strengths in portraying the African trading debates as two mutually exclusive ideologies which could never collaborate or partner has become the historian’s weakness in portraying the Anglo-African trade similarly. In reality, the 1698 Act initiated collaboration between Company and free trader that historians have heretofore failed to understand. Examining the Anglo-African 1 See ‘The Case of Richard and Margaret, 12 November 1684’, in Elizabeth Donnan; Documents Illustrative of the Atlantic Slave Trade to America, Volume I: 1441-1700 (Washington, 1930) pp.333-5. 2 ‘Instructions to Captain Samuel Kempthorne, London, the 4th May 1686’, in Donnan; Documents p.354. 3 Eric Williams; Capitalism and Slavery (London, 1944) p.32. 4 Hugh Thomas; The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1870 (New York, 1997) p.225. 6 trade as much more than just the trade in enslaved Africans, this work looks at these aspects of cooperation, and encompasses the globalised nature of the trade to West Africa, focussing too on the deep commercial links that existed between English regional economies and West African markets by the turn of the eighteenth century. As well as this, with a focus on the Company’s colonial foothold on the West African coast, the imperial ideology of successive English and British governments regarding the West African coast is addressed. In doing so, this work looks primarily at two large datasets, T 70/1198 and T 70/1199; information recorded by the RAC itself, which was to keep track of the Incomings and Outgoings (as the books are eponymously entitled) from the port of London trading to and from West Africa. The Incomings document charts the imported cargoes and vessels from West Africa, with the included commodities as well as the cargo owners and dates of voyage. The Outgoings does much the same, but for the exports and re-exports to West Africa.