With the escalating demand for sugar, combined with the gold rush which began in Brazil in the late 1690s, the beginning of the eighteenth century saw the slave trade growing rapidly: perhaps 150,000 slaves were carried to Brazil alone in the first decade of the century. Furthermore, under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht, signed at the conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, Spain ceded to Britain not only the strategic possessions of Gibraltar and Minorca, but also the much-prized Asiento – the contract to import slaves and other goods to the Spanish Indies. The fact that this contract was sold on by the British government to the South Sea Company for the truly vast sum of £7.5 million is evidence of the commercial excitement it generated, and the confidence that enormous profits were at hand. Such confidence was somewhat misplaced, since many slaving voyages made losses and the trade would become less profitable later in the century, but there was no doubt that lucky or skilful traders could make a spectacular return. In the 1720s British ships carried well over 100,000 slaves to the Americas, mainly to Jamaica and Barbados, with 150 ships, principally based in Bristol and London, fully engaged in the trade. In the 1730s British ships carried around 170,000 slaves, overtaking the Portuguese for the first time. This was the decade that saw a great increase in slave traffic to North America: in 1732 South Carolina became the first English colony on the American mainland to register a black majority. It was also the decade that saw the rise of Liverpool as Britain’s foremost slaving port. Well positioned on England’s west coast for Atlantic traffic, Liverpool also had the advantages of being well away from the French navy in time of war, paying crews lower rates than competing ports and being able to evade duty on the goods carried on the homeward voyage by landing them on the Isle of Man (which became ‘a vast warehouse of smuggled goods’11). Several Liverpool families who plunged heavily into the trade were able to fund commercial dynasties partly as a result, ploughing their profits into banking and manufacturing as the slave trade continued to grow.
In the 1740s, British ships transported no fewer than 200,000 African slaves. Furthermore, the triangular trade this facilitated was fuelling the rapid growth of domestic manufacturing. Some 85 per cent of English textile exports went to Africa at this stage, helping the export trade of cities such as Manchester to soar, while the demand for slaving ships in Liverpool made it a world leader in shipbuilding. With the vast profits coming back from the sugar plantations, cotton exports soaring, and the slave trade itself usually yielding a profit, it is no wonder that it could be written in 1772 that the African slave trade was ‘the foundation of our commerce, the support of our colonies, the life of our navigation, and first cause of our national industry and riches’.12 On taking office in 1783, William Pitt would estimate that profits from the trade with the West Indies accounted for 80 per cent of the income reaching Britain from across the seas. And such was the expansion of colonial production and demand for slaves that in the 1780s, as Wilberforce and Pitt began their political careers, slave traders would carry the truly colossal total of three-quarters of a million people across the Atlantic against their will, with around 325,000 being carried in British ships. Massive in its scale and long-established in its habits, the Atlantic slave trade seemed to many to be crucial to Britain’s prosperity and an indispensable component of her Caribbean empire.
While the statistical record of the slave trade is impressive or horrifying enough, reaching a cumulative total of eleven million people imprisoned and transported across the ocean between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, few people in Europe at the time could have made an accurate guess as to the scale of the trade their nations fostered. More importantly, they would have been entirely unaware of the nature of the human tragedy which every single one of those millions represented. Each one was a child torn from a family, a sister separated from a brother, a husband from a wife or a family removed from the only place in the world they knew or loved. It is only when the slave trade is examined in its individual human consequences that it moves from a study in economic history to a tale of indefensible barbarity.
A glimpse of the heartrending circumstances in which slaves were taken is afforded by the autobiographical writings of Olaudah Equiano (c.1745–97), a slave who was captured as a child in the 1740s in what is now Nigeria, but who subsequently earned his freedom and wrote his story in the English language. His first-hand account of the brutalities of the slave trade played a major role in informing and influencing popular opinion and became a roaring success, with nine editions printed during his lifetime alone.*
One day, when all our people were gone out to their work as usual, and only I and my dear sister were left to mind the house, two men and a woman got over our walls, and in a moment seized us both; and without giving us time to cry out, or make resistance, they stopped our mouths, and ran off with us to the nearest wood. Here they tied our hands, and continued to carry us as far as they could, till night came on, when we reached a small house, where the robbers halted for refreshment and spent the night … The next morning we left the house, and continued travelling all the day. For a long time we had kept to the woods, but at last we came into a road which I believed I knew. I had now some hopes of being delivered; for we had advanced but a little way before I discovered some people at a distance, on which I began to cry out for their assistance: but my cries had no other effect than to make them tie me faster and stop my mouth; they then put me into a large sack. They also stopped my sister’s mouth, and tied her hands; and in this manner we proceeded till we were out of the sight of those people … The next day proved a day of greater sorrow than I had yet experienced; for my sister and I were then separated, while we lay clasped in each other’s arms. It was in vain that we besought them not to part us; she was torn from me, and immediately carried away, while I was left in a state of distraction not to be described.13
Such kidnapping was common. A nineteenth-century study of the origins of subsequently freed slaves suggested that 30 per cent of them had been kidnapped (by other Africans), while 11 per cent had been sold after being condemned by a judicial process (for adultery, for example), 7 per cent had been sold to pay debts and a further 7 per cent had been sold by relations or friends.14 The largest proportion of all, 34 per cent, had been taken in war, but John Newton was probably being too sanguine when he argued that ‘I verily believe, that the far greater part of the wars, in Africa, would cease, if the Europeans would cease to tempt them, by offering goods for slaves.’15 African kingdoms fought wars against each other and enslaved each other’s people long before the Europeans arrived to make matters worse, but there seems little doubt that the lure of the slave trade sometimes contributed to the outbreak of conflict. One observer of the time wrote: ‘The wars which the inhabitants of the interior part of the country … carry on with each other are chiefly of a predatory nature, and owe their origin to the yearly number of slaves which [they] … suppose will be wanted by the vessels which arrive on the coast.’16 On the other hand, a Royal Navy captain, John Matthews, argued that ‘the nations which inhabit the interior parts of Africa … profess the Mahometan religion; and, following the means prescribed by their prophet, are perpetually at war with the surrounding nations who refuse to embrace their religious doctrines … The prisoners made in these religious wars furnish a great part of the slaves which are sold to the Europeans; and would … be put to death if they had not the means of disposing of them.’17 At minimum, the feeding of the slave trade became a way of life for tens of thousands of Africans and a source of power and wealth for trading networks which stretched deep into the interior of the continent, such as that of the Aro traders, and kingdoms which supplied huge numbers of slaves, such as the Lunda empire. It was the supplying of slaves which gave such people access to large quantities of copper, iron and, perhaps above all, guns. One cargo list of a ship setting out to purchase 250 slaves in 1733 included a certain amount of textile products, but showed that the vessel carried most of its estimated value in metals and arms, including four hundred ‘musquets’, forty pairs of ‘Common large Pistols’ and forty ‘blunderbuses’, along with fourteen tons of iron, one thousand copper rods and eighty bottles of brandy.18 Whatever benefit the African tribes derived from the sale of slaves, it was most unlikely to make them more peaceable.
Since most slaves originated far from the coast, perhaps hundreds