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2024

Book chapter by dr.David Brown: ‘The Atlantic Correspondence of the Royal African Company, 1678–1681’, 15 January 2024

The Empire project’s David Brown has contributed a chapter to an edited collection by Sophie Jones and Siobhan Talbott, Business News in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Brill, Leiden). Entitled ‘The Atlantic Correspondence of the Royal African Company, 1678–1681’, the chapter uses incoming letters from West Africa, the Caribbean, Virginia, and ships in transit to challenge the image of the RAC as a coherent, centrally controlled imperial corporation. Although the company’s London headquarters projected order, hierarchy, and bureaucratic efficiency, its letters reveal a far more fragmented organisation, shaped by mortality, fraud, local improvisation, interloping, and the competing interests of colonial officials, ship captains, factors, and plantation owners. The African correspondence exposes fragile factories, inexperienced agents, disease, diplomatic dependence on African polities, and contrasting approaches to commerce and enslavement. The American correspondence, especially from Barbados, Jamaica, and Nevis, shows how RAC agents embedded within colonial government used courts, debt, royal influence, and monopoly claims to secure the supply and sale of enslaved Africans while tolerating or struggling against illicit trade. The chapter argues that the RAC’s correspondence formed an unusually rapid and privileged communications network, carrying commercial intelligence directly to London and even to Charles II. These letters illuminate both the foundations of England’s slave-trading empire and the near-total archival silence imposed on the enslaved people whose lives and deaths underwrote it.