Richard Harris, Slave Trader Spokesman

1991 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 439-458 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Rawley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
International Market ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
The West ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Record ◽  
American Trade

“So little is known of the separate traders,” lamented the historian of the Royal African Company, K. G. Davies, that he was reduced to perceptive speculation about their activity. The authority, Basil Williams, writing about the period 1714–1760, asserted, “The traffic in negro slaves was carried on mainly by the Royal African Company.…“ In actuality a great deal can be discovered about the separate traders and their activity. The papers of Humphry Morice provide a rich source for a merchant who was perhaps London's and Great Britain's foremost slave trader in the 1720s. The assertion that the traffic in Negro slaves was carried on mainly by the Royal African Company is easily refuted by materials in the Public Record Office. London separate traders dominated the trade for the first three decades of the eighteenth century giving way to Bristol traders in the 1730s, who in turn gave way to Liverpool ascendancy in the 1740s.The English slave trade between 1699 and 1729, energized by the end of monopoly and the booming international market for slaves in America, grew prodigiously. In these years England accounted for nearly one-half of all slaves exported from the west coast of Africa. London alone accounted for two-thirds of all slaves delivered by English ships.Although the period falls half a century and more before the classic exposition of the advantages of free trade over monopoly by Adam Smith, an English free trade doctrine had found expression in Sir Dudley North's pamphlet, Discourses upon Trade (1691), and parlimentary proceedings. Interlopers in the slave trade, smugglers in the lucrative Spanish-American trade who opposed parliamentary restriction on their activity, separate traders whose participation in the trade became legalized in 1698, and a variety of commercial, industrial, and planting interests all contributed in their fashion to an outlook favoring free trade in slaves.

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 214-240
Author(s):  
Laura J. Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Points Of Interest

This chapter turns to Joseph Addison's Spectator and finally to Adam Smith, who transformed the theatrical cosmopolitanism of the Restoration into a theory of emotions and cosmopolitics. Like many philosophers in the eighteenth century, Adam Smith aims to understand both emotions and political economy. The chapter explains that the book shows how these two points of interest were profoundly intertwined in the Restoration. In order to try to understand the significance of this intersection, the book turns, as does Smith, to the theater for insight. Restoration theater has been underestimated, partly because the two worlds of Amber and Bruce Carlton have been often read in different contexts and in different kinds of critical projects. While certainly theater audience members of the Restoration period would have had different expectations for comedy, tragedy, tragicomedy, and heroic drama, they nevertheless witnessed them in the same moment of imperial ambition, political turbulence, and cosmopolitan explorations. Restoration plays have sometimes been read as frivolous entertainment or nationalist propaganda, but the book characterizes them as more ambitious and more capacious, often too edgy or insufficiently nationalistic for subsequent contexts. It makes the case for key theater experiences that were produced with wit, daring, and insight as not expressing the last gasp of absolutist monarchy, but instead engaging some beginnings: of war capitalism, of the embrace of sophistication, of England's entrance into the slave trade in earnest, and of new possibilities for human passions redirected for this expanding world.

“DISMEMBERING THE HUMAN CHARACTER”: ADAM FERGUSON’S CONCEPTION OF CORRUPTION

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (02) ◽  
pp. 54-72
Author(s):  
Samuel Fleischacker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
Role Of Government ◽  
The Public ◽  
Liberal Perspective ◽  
Do So

Abstract:This essay lays out three kinds of corruption—personal, structural, and civic—stressing the differences among these phenomena. It then explores civic corruption via the work of the eighteenth-century Scottish thinker Adam Ferguson. Civic corruption occurs when the citizens of a republic lose interest in defending their shared institutions, and pursue their private wealth alone; avoiding it, according to Ferguson, requires placing limits on these private pursuits and getting citizens to participate in the public realm instead. By way of a comparison with Ferguson’s contemporary and friend Adam Smith—who agreed with Ferguson on many issues, although not on what was corrupting about the acquisition of wealth—the essay argues that Ferguson, for all his emphasis on participatory government, was a liberal, not a collectivist. With that in mind, the essay endorses many of Ferguson’s suggestions from a liberal perspective, and argues that, to preserve liberal republics, it is often necessary to expand what governments do, so as to maintain the commitment of citizens to their public institutions. This prescriptive implication brings out sharply how civic corruption differs from personal corruption, which may best be limited by shrinking the role of government, rather than expanding it.

The records of the Charity Commissions a source for urban history

Urban History ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 31-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Grady
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Urban History ◽  
Effective Utilization ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
The Public ◽  
Charity Commission ◽  
Public Record ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Made In

Officially sponsored investigation of charities has a long history encompassing the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century commissions issued under the Statutes of Charitable Uses of 1597 and 1601, and the brief national inquiry made for the Gilbert returns of 1787–8. It was in the nineteenth century, however, that the first detailed general surveys of English and Welsh charities were made. In August 1818, amidst revived interest in the more effective utilization of charitable funds, the Brougham Commission was appointed by parliament to examine the state of charitable trusts for educational purposes in England. With the renewal and widening of its powers in the following year, it spent almost two decades investigating charitable trusts of all types in England and Wales. The Commission expired in 1837 but, after lengthy vacillation, parliament set up a permanent body in 1853. Like its predecessor, this new commission began collecting up-to-date information about charitable trusts; a task it still performs today. The invaluable products of the two commissions are several voluminous series of reports and digests printed in Parliamentary Papers between 1819 and 1913, and extensive records dating from 1819 held by the Charity Commission and the Public Record Office. This article discusses these sources and their value to the urban historian.

Sortings and ‘Ounce Trade’ in the West African Slave Trade

1964 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 381-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl Polanyi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West African ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
The West ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Two Systems

The records of trading between Africans and Europeans on the Guinea Coast since antiquity raise issues the practical resolution of which has never ceased to occupy economic historians. The Herodotean inadequacies of dumb barter in Carthaginian goods and in gold dust were fully resolved only at the time of the eighteenth-century slave trade. In Senegambia and even on the Windward Coast, as we now know, the Royal African Company had still to go without an effective profit-and-loss accountancy. With the advent of the regular slave trade two new commercial devices had to be introduced by the Europeans. Both the ‘sorting’ and the ‘ounce trade’ sprang from the vital need for adjustment between the radically different trading methods of Europeans and Africans. And it was not so much a case of mutual adjustment, for of the two systems only one, the European, adjusted.

2. Arthur Dobbs, Adam Smith and Walpole’s Excise Scheme

1961 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-207
Author(s):  
C. R. Fay
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
North West ◽  
The Public ◽  
University Library ◽  
The North ◽  
Public Record ◽  
Rough Draft

The writer is Arthur Dobbs (1689–1765), M.P. for Carrickfergus, later Governor of North Carolina, and a lifelong believer in the North-West Passage. The letter is in the Walpole Papers. (Cambridge University Library by courtesy of the Marquis of Cholmondeley), but the Memorandum to which it relates is absent. However, the rough draft of the Memorandum, from which I quote at length, is in the Dobbs Papers from Castle Dobbs, Carrickfergus, now on deposit with the Public Record Office, Belfast, and there marked ‘82, undated’.

The American and West Indian Trades

2012 ◽  
pp. 257-288
Author(s):  
Ralph Davis
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The West ◽  
North West ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Transatlantic Trade ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Navigation Acts ◽  
The Impact ◽  
American Trade

This chapter explores trade between Britain, America, and the West Indies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It identifies the two types of English settlement in America - the plantation colonies and the farm colonies, then details each of their approaches to the shipping trade. It also traces the growth of the sugar and tobacco trades and the shift toward North-West tobacco shipping over London. Other essential developments include the impact of the Navigation Acts on Anglo-American trade; the rise of tobacco smuggling in Liverpool and Glasgow; the effects of crop seasonality on transatlantic trade; and the workings of the transatlantic slave trade, particularly through the port of Liverpool. It includes shipping statistics and contemporary correspondence to provide further detail about the structure of transatlantic trade.

Slave Exports from West and West-Central Africa, 1700–1810: new estimates of volume and distribution

1989 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Coast ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
The West ◽  
Commodity Production ◽  
West Central ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Demographic Effects

Using new evidence on the British, French and North American slave-carrying trades, this article seeks to revise Lovejoy's recently published estimates of the levels of slave exports from West and West-Central Africa in the eighteenth century. The figures suggest that Lovejoy's estimate of the total volume of slave exports from the west coast of Africa to America between 1700 and 1810 was probably reasonably accurate, being only 8 per cent lower than the total indicated here. However, the new data reveal temporal and coastal distributions of slave exports that differ substantially from those proposed by Lovejoy. In particular, they suggest that previous work significantly understated levels of slave exports between 1713 and 1740, and again in the 1760s and 1770s. Contrary to earlier findings, in fact, it appears that slave exports from the west coast of Africa to America in the decade prior to the War of American Independence were very similar to levels attained after 1783. Furthermore, in terms of coastal distributions, it seems that the Bight of Biafra and West-Central Africa, particularly the Loango coast, contributed much more substantially to the slave traffic to America during the early decades of the century than was previously assumed. These revisions of Lovejoy's figures have important implications for movements in slave prices in Africa and for assessing the demographic effects of the trade on the slave-supplying regions. In addition, they help to improve our understanding of the relationship between the slave trade and changes in sugar and other commodity production in America during the eighteenth century.

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