by Hugh Thomas
The consequence of all this activity was that, in the ten years between 1721 and 1730, the British carried well over 100,000 slaves to the Americas, much the same number as in the previous decade: of these, nearly 40,000 went to Jamaica, over 20,000 to Barbados (many were taken thence to Cuba and elsewhere in the Spanish empire), about 10,000 to mainland colonies such as South Carolina, and nearly 50,000 to British Caribbean colonies. Among shippers, London was still ahead: an average of about 56 ships a year left between 1723 and 1727, while Bristol sent 34 ships and Liverpool 11.
The prince of London slave merchants in these days was Humphrey Morice, of Mincing Lane, member of Parliament, and governor of the Bank of England between 1727 and 1728. Morice had been an effective spokesman for the independent traders in the complaints against the Royal Africa Company. In 1720, he had eight ships in the trade, all named after his wife or daughters, often loading gunpowder and spirits in Rotterdam. He seems to have preferred to sell the slaves whom he bought on the Gold Coast to the Portuguese on that same continent, rather than send his ships across the Atlantic: “You may take Brazil tobacco in payment,” he told Captain William Clinch in 1721.14 But sometimes his captains took their cargoes of captives to Virginia or Maryland (almost all the slaves imported there in the early eighteenth century were brought in London ships), or Jamaica. Morice was a pioneer in medical treatment of both crews and slaves: he usually had a surgeon on board his ships and, for reasons of health, captains also had to buy limes before the Middle Passage across the Atlantic—long before Dr. James Lind published his famous recommendation on the benefits of the regular use of that fruit, in his Treatise on the Scurvy in 1754.
The 1730s saw Bristol overtaking London as Britain’s main slave port (though London continued a center for marine insurance, as for finding the right cargoes, and some merchants of the city maintained ships in the slave trade until the 1790s). Bristol was sending nearly fifty ships a year to Africa between 1728 and 1732, carrying well over a hundred thousand slaves on them. In comparison, London and Liverpool, a rising star in slave commerce, sent in the same years forty and forty-four ships respectively. Merchants from Bristol were also pioneers in the business of carrying slaves to Virginia, and in moving slaves from one North American colony to another.
The most prominent merchants in Africans in Bristol were Isaac Hob-house, who undertook forty-four slave voyages between 1722 and 1747; James Day, with fifty-six voyages between 1711 and 1742; Richard Henvill, who began slaving in 1709; and later James Laroche, of Huguenot origin, from Bordeaux, whose father had come to England in the train of Prince George of Denmark about 1705, and who was far the biggest slave trader of the city, sending out 132 slave voyages between 1728 and 1769.15
In the Caribbean, there were similar changes. Jamaica had by now overtaken Barbados as the prize colony of the English. Being—as settlers there noticed, with a taste for accurate mathematics not always evident in their returns—twenty-six times bigger than Barbados, it seemed to have a chance of becoming richer than all other British islands. About the turn of the eighteenth century, the European population there stood at seven thousand, that of slaves at forty-five thousand. In 1712, her production of sugar already exceeded that of Barbados. The richest planter of the island, Peter Beckford, was also the most powerful: at his death in 1735, he owned nine sugar plantations and was part owner of seven more. His son, William, returned to London, would become an MP and the most powerful businessman in the City of London, of which he would be twice lord mayor, becoming one of the few close friends of the elder William Pitt. But he always maintained his twenty-two thousand acres of sugar land in Jamaica, and the pride of his family, Drax Hall, in the central parish of Saint Ann, had both a windmill and a water mill.
These were, of course, great days for British trade and manufacturing. The commercial prospects of the colonies in both North America and the West Indies seemed limitless. Nearly all the increase in British exports of commodities which occurred in the sixty years after the Act of Union in 1707 went to markets outside Europe. Continental European customers for British goods also grew, if more slowly, and, about 1750, half the goods exported to Africa (cloths, iron bars, brandy) constituted re-exports from the continent of Europe.
In the 1730s, British ships carried perhaps 170,000 slaves in all—for the first time, probably, more in ten years than the Portuguese carried to Brazil. Perhaps 40,000 slaves went to the southern mainland colonies in North America (Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas; Georgia formally held out against employing slaves till 1750). This was four times the total of the previous ten years. Forty-two thousand probably went to Jamaica, a little under 30,000 to Barbados, and 60,000 to other places. Probably one-third of the British slaves taken to the Americas were still intended, via Jamaica, for the Spanish empire.16
The contraband traffic sponsored by the South Sea Company, as much in manufactured goods as in slaves, had by the late 1730s reached such a scale that Spain’s imperial economy was beginning to suffer. In 1737, the Casa de Contratación told the king that the merchants of Seville could not sell any of their clothing in the empire, because of the quantity of smuggled English goods available. The Spanish government did what it could to limit the damage. In 1733, the viceroy of Peru was even ordered not to take gold or silver to ports where the company’s ships might dock. A small fleet of coast-guard sloops was also established, off Cartagena and Havana. The War of Jenkins’s Ear of 1739 was inspired by one of these coast guards’ alleged treatment of Robert Jenkins, captain of the brig Rebecca, off Cuba. In 1739, the British and Spanish governments, in an attempt to preserve peace, called an end to all such search-and-seize operations. But the South Sea Company refused a Spanish request for an examination of its books and, instead, demanded handsome compensation for the impounded property. War followed in November, and the company never recovered its position afterwards.
Bristol’s pre-eminence in the slave trade lasted barely twenty years. Just as London, with the relative decline of the RAC, had given way to Bristol, so now Bristol gave way to Liverpool.
The rise of Liverpool is a remarkable history, in which the slave trade played an important, perhaps even a decisive, part. That was certainly the claim of General Bonastre Tarleton, an M.P. who came from a slave-trading family, in a speech of 1806 defending the commerce, in which he described how the place had thereby risen from being a fishing hamlet, “to become the second place in wealth and population in the British Empire.” The city’s maritime business had begun with the Irish trade and, by 1670, she was already trading in a small way to North America and to the West Indies, as well as Madeira and the Canary Islands. Liverpool’s merchants were at first all interlopers, men operating on a small scale and without much attention to accurate returns. Already by that time, the city had many local industries which led easily to good exports: linen, glass, leather, various metal goods, as well as shipbuilding.
During the French wars of the first years of the eighteenth century, Liverpool already seemed a prosperous port, with fine streets and many grand houses of stone, in which the richer merchants lived. The leaders of the corporation were generally supporters of the Protestant succession, the merchants being mostly Anglicans and Whigs, but many of the seamen were dissenters. Defoe in 1726 rightly called Liverpool “the Bristol of this part of England.”17 Its new wet dock, the first in England outside London, opened in 1715.
Liverpool’s entry into the slave trade occurred in the 1690s, though the first slave ship of which there is record was the Liverpool Merchant of 1700: it carried 220 slaves to Barbados. From the beginning, as in other ports, the trade interested the city’s powerful men: Sir Thomas Johnson, the architect of the new wet dock, member of Parliament, and mayor, had a 50-percent interest in the Blessing, the second Liverpool slave ship of which anything is known. Whereas Bristol carried many slaves for Jamaica to be sold to the Spanish merchants who regularly visited that island, Liverpool specialized, in the years after 1713, in a direct a
nd illegal slave trade to the Spanish empire, especially to Havana and Cartagena de Indias.
By 1740, Liverpool was sending thirty-three ships a year to Africa, and every year the total grew. The reasons were various. Thus, Liverpool was better placed for the Atlantic trade than London, and was less exposed in time of war to the French than was Bristol. By often landing their goods on the homeward voyage on the Isle of Man, “a vast warehouse of smuggled goods,” Liverpool captains were able to evade duty on the returning cargo. Liverpool traders also found cargoes for the slave trade in that island, such as brass, arms, and gunpowder. In addition, Liverpool traders could avoid the risk of meeting marauders by sending their ships round the north of Ireland and into the Atlantic by that route. Liverpool captains and crews seem also to have been treated more austerely by their owners than Bristol and London ones: “The generality of their captains were at annual salaries,” a historian of Liverpool would comment, “or, if at monthly pay, four pounds were thought great wages . . . , no cabin privileges were allowed, primage [bounties] was unknown among them and, as to port allowances, not a single shilling was given.”18 Liverpool merchants, themselves often ex-captains or seamen, would pay crews less well than those in Bristol: one reason why the former were able to sell their cargoes for 12 percent less than the rest of the kingdom, and return with an equal profit. In Africa, Bristol merchants tended to remain faithful to safe old anchorages in the Gold Coast and Angola, while their Liverpool confrères struck out anew to seek Africans in Sierra Leone, Gabon, and the Cameroons.
In 1753, four families had private carriages in Liverpool. Three were owned by slave merchants. The outstanding man among these was Foster Cunliffe, who had come to Liverpool from the Lancashire countryside. He associated with a merchant, Richard Norris, who turned to slaving about 1720. Cunliffe made a fortune and was mayor three times. Most years in the 1730s, he would send four or more ships to Africa. We are told that he was “stern and obstinate,” but also philanthropic, being president of the Liverpool Infirmary, and a sponsor of the Blue Coat school. In a chapel of Saint Peter’s Church, Liverpool, Cunliffe is described as “a merchant whose sagacity, honesty and diligence procured wealth and credit to himself and his country; a magistrate who administered justice with discernment, candour and impartiality; a Christian devout and exemplary. . . .”19 Before he died he secured his son’s election to Parliament, in a contest in which the candidate is said to have been “helped by his father’s popularity.” The Cunliffes also had excellent commercial representation in North America, with a headquarters at Oxford, on the east side of the Chesapeake Bay, as well as a large store at New Town (the modern Chestertown, Maryland). His chief representative there was for many years Robert Morris, father of the financier of the American Revolution.VI
Ellis’s fellow MP for Liverpool, Charles Pole, was a slave merchant too, as was his predecessor, John Hardman (“the great Hardman”), and also his successor, Richard Pennant, later father of the Welsh slate trade, who owned properties in Jamaica, with all of whose leading families, such as the Beckfords, he was connected by blood (he became Lord Penrhyn in 1780).
Liverpool was in no way shy about the benefits brought her by the slave trade. The façade of the Exchange carried reliefs of Africans’ heads, with elephants, in a frieze, and one street was commonly known as “Negro Row.”VII
Bristol did not produce lasting dynasties among slave traders: her most astringent historian sharply comments that five of the leading twenty-six Bristol slavers died bachelors and a further ten died without male heirs.20 But several Liverpool slave merchants founded great families, many of whom continued rich and influential after the trade in slaves had ended (for example, the Leylands, the Cunliffes, the Bolds, and the Kennions). The fortunes of several important Liverpool slave merchants became the basis of banks and new manufacturies, such as those of the Leylands, the Hanlys, and the Ingrams.
Liverpool was also the main outlet for Manchester’s new products. The latter’s cotton goods early in the eighteenth century dominated the West India market, and were also much sought after by Spanish buyers. Costs of transport between Liverpool and Manchester, already low, were transformed by the opening of the Bridgewater Canal after 1772 (the price of transport changed from forty shillings a ton by road to six shillings by canal).
The consequence was remarkable: Manchester’s export trade was negligible in 1739, standing at £14,000 a year. Twenty years later, it had increased to over £100,000 and, by 1779, it stood at over £300,000. A third of this business went to Africa, principally items exchanged for slaves, and half either to the West Indies or the North American colonies. The favorites were cotton goods, especially the coarse striped annabasses copied from India. English dyeing, like French dyeing, was poor, and could not at first achieve the bright colors of the Indians. Manchester, however, was clever in marketing its cotton checks (“Guinea cloths”), which enjoyed every year a greater success in Africa.VIII Every year too more and more (nearly three-quarters by 1750) of the goods traded by British slave merchants to Africa were manufactured in England.
The outstanding manufacturer of cotton checks was Samuel Touchett, who was also an occasional slave merchant. The son of a pin-maker in Warrington, he was one of the three first patrons of Lewis Paul’s unsuccessful spinning machine. He was an insurer, too, on a large scale. He helped to equip the British expedition which captured the settlements on the river Sénégal from the French in 1758, and subsequently sought unsuccessfully for a monopoly of trading there. He next went to London as the representative of the family firm, becoming “the prime mover in parliamentary agitations” and the man who presented Manchester’s many petitions to the government. He became a member of Parliament in the interest of the duke of Newcastle, and a friend of the corrupt but charming paymaster-general, Henry Fox. He had a partnership in West Indian business, through which he sent ships with slaves to Havana when the British captured it in 1762. After the British occupation of Florida in 1763, he bought land there. Finally, he advised Charles Townshend, the chancellor of the Exchequer, to introduce the taxes which led to the American rebellion (his advice was listened to, since it was supposed that he knew everything about America as well as finance). His career was so various that it might have been he, instead of his chancellor, whom Edmund Burke compared to “a tesselated pavement without cement.”
In both Liverpool and Bristol, the success of the slave trade was naturally a fillip to shipbuilding; and, by the end of the century, the leading Liverpool firm of shipbuilders, Baker and Dawson, had become the largest slavers, with a special license to sell to the Spanish colonies.
This new trade by British captains and merchants meant, in the absence of any laws to the contrary, that Africans were now being sold in Britain on a small scale. Many advertisements were to be seen for black boys “fit to wait on a gentleman” or for, for instance, “a healthy negro girl aged about fifteen years, speaks good English, works at her needle, washes well, does household work, and has had the smallpox.”21 In Liverpool, these slaves were frequently advertised for sale on the steps of Silvester Moorecroft’s new red-brick Custom House, the assumption being that what prevailed in the West Indies should prevail at home. Lord Chesterfield had a slave boy at the Hague in 1728, when he was British ambassador, as did Charles, the radical, and tolerant, third duke of Richmond. Black boys were often treated as toys by duchesses. When they grew old, they were usually sent to the West Indies. Newspapers often advertised for runaway slaves. In 1690, Williamson’s Advertiser spoke about “a negro named Will, aged about 22, he had a grey suit, and speaks English well. Whoever secures him, and gives notice to Mr Lloyd [the founder of Lloyd’s insurers] at his coffee house in Tower Street shall have a guinea reward.” Most slaves were, of course, recaptured, for their black color caused them to stand out. But some humane people assisted the runaways, and the act of escape was looked on as a civil offense, not a crime.IX
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Meantime, the failu
re of France to gain the asiento in the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 had had a remarkable effect on the French slave traffic. A sense of realism seized French commercial policymakers after the collapse of Law’s great schemes. The old Guinea and Sénégal companies were abolished, and though Law’s company survived, trade to Africa was opened to all French merchants who wished to go there, provided admittedly that they derived from one of five privileged ports: Rouen, La Rochelle, Bordeaux, Saint-Malo—and, above all, “fortunate” Nantes, the “eye of Brittany.”22 It is true that, thereafter, each merchant had to pay a tax of thirty livres on each slave taken to Saint-Domingue, and fifteen livres on those carried to Martinique and Guadeloupe. The possibility of raising money through taxation of slaves was, indeed, the justification of the Crown’s limitation to five ports (other cities were, naturally, angry with the limitation). The money gathered by taxation was to be spent on forts and trading posts in Africa. But alongside these taxes, the arrangements encouraged the French slave trade by helpful concessions: all French manufactured goods, for example, as well as all imported East Indian goods used for buying slaves, were declared exempt from export duties; and “sugars and other types of merchandise from the islands, purchased from the sale of slaves,” would receive a reduction of 50 percent of the tax concerned on entry into France. These imports would not be taxed at all if re-exported to, among others, Holland or Germany.
