Free to Enslave: Politics and the Escalation of Britain's Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1688-1714 Author(s): William A. Pettigrew Source: The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 64, No. 1, Free to Enslave: Politics and the Escalation of Britain's Translantic (Jan., 2007), pp. 3-38 Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4491595 . Accessed: 10/02/2011 05:52 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. 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Pettigrew vention, and histories of abolitionism traditionally privilege the movement's political aspects over its economic rationales. Explanations for the expansion of British slave trading in the Atlantic (and the origins of American slavery) concentrate, contrastingly, on the atomized economic calculations of colonists and their suppliers. Yet there remains an underappreciated political aspect to the development of Britain's slave trade. From 1690 to 1714, members of Parliament debated the slave trade in sixteen parliamentary sessions, absorbing about the same amount of legislative time as discussions of its abolition decades later. Would a joint-stock monopoly company-the Royal African Company-better satisfy the colonies' demand for slave labor and better serve the interests of the British state than an open trade in which any subject was free to trade in slaves?1These debates, surprisingly ignored William A. Pettigrew is a doctoral candidate at Lincoln College, Oxford. The author wishes to thank John Griffin and all the participants in the University of Oxford and the University of Virginia's virtual seminars in Atlantic history, 2004-6. He also thanks Phil Morgan, Anthony Parent, David Richardson, Phil Stern, and the anonymous readers for the William and Mary Quarterlyfor their suggestions about ways to improve this article. 1 Roger Anstey supplied the classic political narrative of British abolitionism. See Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 176o-i8io (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., I975), 406. For a famous attempt to show how the politics of aboli- tionism served economic ends, see Eric Williams, Capitalismand Slavery(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1944). For the belief that the rise and fall of slave trade volumes was determined primarily by economic factors, see Richard Nelson Bean, The British Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade,i65o-i775 (New York, 1975), 73. Most slave trade scholarsattribute some role to the state in the establishmentof the English slave trade to the Caribbean.See Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1999), 74-102. Throughout this article I equate the entrenchment of mainland American slavery after 1700 with the escalation of the slave trade. The distinction between slaveryand the slave trade derived partly from the abolitionists' decision to legislate against them separatelyand partly from the development of a culture of slaveholding in what would become the United States that noted the benefit of creating a self-sustainingpopulation of slaves Williamand Mary Quarterly,3d Series, Volume LXIV, Number I, Januaryzoo7 4 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY by historians, had a considerable effect on the evolution of Britain's transatlanticslave trade. Locating the escalationof the trade within its broadand rich political context shows how modernpolitical cultureand institutionswere involved in the escalationas well as the later abandon- ment of Britain'strade in human beings. In the century after I66o, the annual volume of the English slave trade increasedfrom approximatelyseven thousand to more than forty thousand.Slave trade historianstypically rely on war (in Europeand in West Africa), fluctuating planter purchasingpower due to oscillating colonial commodityprices, and the changingavailability of white inden- tured labor to explain the rise and fall of slave trade volumes.2They to preventthe need to buy slavesin the trade.In conflatingslavery and the slave trade in their developmental stages, I fix attention on the preabolitionist perception of slaves as goods, which helps to dismiss arguments in the literature that view the mutual reinforcement of ideas associated with liberty and enslavement as paradoxi- cal. See esp. Edmund S. Morgan, AmericanSlavery, American Freedom: The Ordealof Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), 4-5. The absence of a coordinated transition from indentured servitude to slavery on the American mainland remains an impor- tant tradition within the literature. See Russell Menard, "From Servants to Slaves: The Transformation of the Chesapeake Labor System," SouthernStudies 16, no. 4 (Winter 1977): 363, 389. See also David Brion Davis, Slaveryand Human Progress (New York, 1984), 54. Throughout this article I define open trade in contradistinc- tion to a monopolistically organized trade. My definition of open trade includes the situation of the Africa trade under the terms of the Africa Trade Act in which the state levied a duty on trade and the similar scenario sometimes proposed by the sep- arate traders of a regulated company that had exclusive control of their trades and permitted all Englishmen to trade after payment of a small entry fine. Unlike joint- stock companies, members traded on private account. I define free trade as a situa- tion in which the state has no formal regulation of trade, which is what occurred in the Africa trade from 1712 onward. 2 David Richardson, "The British Empire and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 166o-1807," in The EighteenthCentury, ed. P. J. Marshall,vol. 2, The OxfordHistory of the British Empire(Oxford, Eng., 1998), 441, 443. For the importance attached to war and commodity prices, see Bean, British Trans-AtlanticSlave Trade,74. For the importance of changing availabilityof white indentured labor, see Menard, Southern Studies i6: 355-89; David W. Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America:An Economic Analysis (Cambridge, 1981), 152. The opening up of new lands for settle- ment in North America also increaseddemand for slaves. Isolating the effect of these determinants is difficult because they interrelate;warfare affected markets for plan- tation goods and restrictedthe supply of white servants, and largerslave populations expanded the supply of colonial commodities and therefore affected their price. Nevertheless in the peacetime years 1683-84, when the London price of muscavado sugar declined from just less than twenty-two shillings to nineteen shillings per pound, the total annual volume of the slave trade dropped from more than thirteen thousand to fewer than eight thousand (a 42 percent reduction). For sugar prices, see Richard Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery:An Economic History of the British West Indies, r623-1775 (Baltimore, 1973), 496-97. For slave volumes, see David Eltis, "The British Transatlantic Slave Trade before 1714: Annual Estimates of Volume and Direction," in The LesserAntilles in the Age of EuropeanExpansion, ed. Robert L. POLITICSAND THE TRANSATLANTICSLAVE TRADE have not appreciated how political changes allowed interests on both sides of the Atlantic to lobby to change Britain's slave-trading franchise from monopoly to open trade. The demise of the Royal African Company's monopoly had an enormous effect on the volume of Britain's transatlantic slave trade. Though the company could never entirely enforce its monopoly, its demise allowed more Englishmen to become involved in the slave trade and ship many more slaves. The company's monopoly power decreased in three stages. First, in 1688, James II's flight deprived the company of its governor and its best means of enforcing its monopoly. Second, in 1698, after public delibera- tions throughout the 169Os,Parliament passed the Africa TradeAct, which opened the slave trade to all English citizens for a period of thirteen years on payment of a Io percent duty on imports and exports. Independent slave traders became known as separate traders. Third, these separate traders prevented the company from gaining parliamentary recognition for its monopoly, and the 1698 act expired in 1712, opening up the slave trade to all. In 1686, during James II's reign, when the Royal African Company's monopoly came closest to being enforceable, English slavers embarked on thirty-seven