THE SLAVE TRADE, THE ASIENTO, AND THE NATIONAL INTEREST, 1698–1718
The 1690s had not been kind to the Royal African Company. Politically isolated, it no longer influenced colonial appointments or imperial policies. It also suffered financially, which was exacerbated by the way its enemies portrayed the company as a throwback to the worst of Stuart absolutism. Although the company hoped the Ten Percent Act of 1698 would improve its financial fortunes, it soon became apparent that any money it received from separate traders was offset by the increased costs of greater competition on the African coast. By 1707, it was clear to the company that the Ten Percent Act was not working to its advantage.1 It spent the better part of the next five years trying to undo the act. From 1707 to 1712, the company presented its case to the Board of Trade and Parliament, which proved hostile to any attempts to reinstitute a monopoly on the slave trade. These attempts triggered a new wave of public interest in the status of the slave trade, and both the company’s supporters and the separate traders and their allies appealed to the public in the form of published pamphlets and broadsides.
While the African Company continued to appeal to the public to support its position and regain its financial footing, it also focused on a venture in cooperation with a new joint-stock corporation. The South Sea Company was founded in the spring of 1711 by Queen Anne’s trusted adviser and Lord Treasurer, Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, in order to solve a looming credit crisis caused by the nation’s enormous war debts. Creditors would exchange debt for stock in the new company. As an incentive to investors and creditors, Oxford gave the South Sea Company a monopoly on trade to and from Spanish America knowing full well that not only would peace soon be negotiated between Britain, Spain, and France, ending the War of Spanish Succession, but that the terms of the peace would be commercially beneficial to Britain by including the asiento, the exclusive contract to provide the Spanish American colonies with African slaves.2 The contract promised to be especially lucrative, because the Spanish appeared to have an insatiable need for slaves in their colonies but were not direct participants in the slave trade themselves. The British (and especially the African Company) had coveted providing the Spanish American colonies with slaves for decades. In 1713, the South Sea Company contracted with the Royal African Company to help fulfill the terms of the asiento. The African Company viewed this contract as a political and financial lifeline that could reverse its bad fortunes.
The creation of the South Sea Company with the explicit purpose of gaining the asiento was not merely the result of Oxford’s inside information on the probable course of a peace settlement. It occurred at a time when the African slave trade had been at the center of national attention for decades. This chapter explores the relationship between the South Sea Company’s procurement of the asiento and the slave-trade debates of 1707–1712, which highlighted the popular perception of the slave trade’s importance to the British imperial economy. The new company’s emergence in the midst of these popular debates was not coincidental, and it represented a key development in the evolution of the British dominance of the transatlantic slave trade. The South Sea Company’s backers understood that there was a widespread perception among the British public that slavery and the slave trade provided significant economic benefits to the nation and could even solve a vexing and potentially dangerous credit crisis.3 Although ultimately the asiento contract was not enough to save the African Company, in the end it represented the culmination of many decades of increased colonial dependence on slavery and the economic benefits that this dependence seemed to create, both in the colonies and in the metropolis.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE 1698 ACT
In the immediate aftermath of the Ten Percent Act becoming law, the African Company hoped that the 10 percent duty would help improve its financial condition. But the act soon proved disappointing. The company claimed that revenue collected did not provide enough capital to maintain its buildings or its foothold in the trade. Increased competition meant that African traders could raise prices because they now could sell slaves to the highest bidders. As a result, prices for slaves in the colonies rose so dramatically that colonial planters now complained about private traders. Governor William Beeston of Jamaica, a longtime enemy of the African Company, claimed in 1700 that private merchants came to the colony “under pretence they would supply Negroes more plentiful and cheap … and whereas the Royal Company usually supplied Negroes at 22 and 24 £ p head & gave 6, 8, & 12 months credit, now the [private] merchants sell for 34£ p head and give no credit at all.”4 Despite earlier protests about the African Company’s monopoly, the opening of the trade made slaves more expensive and credit harder to obtain.
Despite the survival of the African Company in 1698, it was never able to regain its position either as a significant trading entity or as a key institution of imperial administration. Rather than improving the company’s situation, the Ten Percent Act forced it to compete more vigorously for a dwindling share of the market in African slaves. The company ordered its agents in West Africa to do their best to prevent African traders from selling slaves to separate traders and foreign merchants. This proved to be a serious problem, because many company agents themselves frequently sold slaves for their own personal profit. The company worried that its access to slaves in West Africa had diminished to such a degree that its directors encouraged agents in Africa to cultivate trade in other commodities, especially gold and ivory. The company was so desperate to keep interlopers at bay that it even signed an agreement in 1707 with its main commercial rival, the Dutch West India Company, to work together to block illegal traders.5
Despite these efforts, the company continued to lose market share throughout the early 1700s. The separate traders not only outbid the company for slaves in Africa, but dramatically outperformed the company in terms of numbers of slaves transported across the Atlantic. Using a comprehensive database of transatlantic slaving voyages from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, David Eltis has calculated perhaps the most accurate numbers to date on the transatlantic slave trade. As table 2 shows, Eltis estimates that from 1676 to 1700, approximately 243,300 Africans were forcibly taken across the Atlantic in British ships. From 1701 to 1725 British slavers brought about 380,900 slaves to the Americas. This is an increase of one-and-a-half times. Most telling, it has been estimated that between 60 percent and 80 percent of the market was controlled by interlopers by 1700. These numbers indicated not only the continued high demand for slaves in the colonies, but that many independent merchants took advantage of the end of the African Company’s monopoly. Table 3, also taken from Eltis’s calculations, illustrates the estimated arrivals of slaves in Barbados, the Leeward Islands, and Jamaica from 1662 to 1713. Although slave deliveries to Barbados seem to have peaked during the 1680s with approximately 39,000 slaves, deliveries of slaves to all three colonies remained high after the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689, which could be an indication of separate-trader success in the trade.6
Table 3. Estimated Arrivals of Slaves to English Colonies in English/British Ships |
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Year |
Barbados |
Leeward Islands |
Jamaica |
1662–1670 |
30,318 |
2,801 |
11,031 |
1671–1680 |
21,400 |
9,566 |
20,323 |
1681–1690 |
39,101 |
14,146 |
27,730 |
1691–1700 |
29,394 |
5,304 |
35,945 |
1701–1707 |
25,629 |
10,414 |
30,808 |
1708–1713 |
10,167 |
7,048 |
34,711 |
Total |
156,009 |
49,279 |
160,548 |
Source: David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 208, table 8.3. |
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By 1707, the African Company’s directors decided to appeal to Parliament to urge the repeal or alteration of the Ten Percent Act. In December of that year, the company presented its case to Parliament and the Board of Trade, and that month the board opened an investigation into the state of the African trade. Just prior to the start of this inquiry, the Board of Trade experienced a significant overhaul in the midst of an ascendancy of Whigs in Queen Anne’s ministry during the War of Spanish Succession (1702–1713), which influenced the direction and tone of the investigation. The ministry of Lord Godolphin as Lord Treasurer, the Duke of Marlborough as captain general of the queen’s forces in Europe, and Robert Harley as speaker of the House of Commons and secretary of state for the northern department had attempted to govern through a broad coalition of moderates who supported the war effort and Marlborough’s military strategies from 1704. But by the end of 1706, Whigs had begun to maneuver themselves into some of the most powerful ministerial positions, including Charles Spenser, third Earl of Sunderland (Marlborough’s son-in-law), who was appointed secretary of state for the southern department. In the middle of 1707, he began to reshape the Board of Trade by removing remaining Tories and less-than-loyal Whigs. The most significant departure from the board was William Blathwayt, its longest-serving and most knowledgeable member. New members included the Earl of Stamford, Baron Herbert of Cherbury, Robert Monckton, John Pulteney, and Sir Charles Turner. Historian Ian Steele has characterized these men as Whig place-seekers with little regard for the inner workings of trade or imperial administration, who were appointed to secure Whig support in Parliament for the ministry’s agenda. Just as the board’s investigation into the state of African trade got under way, the Godolphin-Marlborough-Harley ministry shattered in January and February 1708 over mismanagement of the war effort and political affairs. Godolphin and Marlborough once and for all threw in their lot with the Whigs who embraced the ministry’s continental war strategy and the necessity of preventing France from ruling Spain and Spanish America.7 For the next two years, the Whig Junto, led by Sunderland, directed Britain’s foreign, domestic, and imperial policy.
This was the political context that shaped the Board of Trade’s investigation into the state of African trade. Historians have noted that the board’s investigation was carried out in such a way that the African Company stood little chance of a fair hearing. Although the board requested information from the company about its finances and property holdings, it depended almost entirely on the opinions and testimony of the separate traders in its investigation. The board asked the separate traders about the necessity of forts and castles for carrying on the slave trade in Africa and also asked them if there “were any complaints against the said Company as to the ill management of that trade, what those complaints were, by whom made, and what done thereupon?” The board then requested the separate traders’ opinions on the worth of the company’s stock and property, the value of its imports and exports to and from Africa, and “What defects do you find in the constitution of their present charter?” In January 1708, the separate traders responded that they had little if any need to use the company’s buildings and claimed to “carry on their commerce with the natives in safety and freedom without the protection of the forts and castles,” many of which were in no condition to provide much protection in the first place. They also questioned the company’s management of the revenue from the Ten Percent Act, and called for the African Company’s financial books to be inspected. “We have reason to believe that part of their late adventures and dividends have been out of the sum of our Ten p Cent paid them, and not employed in the maintaining of their forts and castles as was intended.” They blamed the company for neglecting Maryland and Virginia entirely and argued that a regulated company should take over the African trade. In presenting its case, the company emphasized that the 10 percent duty did not cover expenses for the upkeep of its forts and castles, and that increases in slave prices in the colonies were a direct result of the competition for market share in Africa created by the act.8
The board issued a report to Queen Anne in February 1708, which accepted the claims made by the separate traders almost entirely. The report agreed that the company misallocated its funds and argued that if the 10 percent revenue had properly been managed, the company would have plenty for the upkeep of its forts and castles. The board also agreed that the company’s buildings provided little if any protection, and that “Cape Coast Castle is the only place of strength.” The board argued that a joint-stock corporation should not be entrusted with such an “absolutely necessary” trade, because it would limit it to a particular area of the Gold Coast of Africa where its forts were concentrated, decrease the number of ships involved in the trade, and never provide the colonies with the numbers of slaves they demanded. The board agreed that the trade should instead be run by a regulated company.9
The Board of Trade continued its investigation throughout 1708, and late that year it drew up an act disestablishing the African Company and creating a regulated company in its place. Although Parliament did not take action on the proposed legislation, the board in conjunction with the House of Commons expanded its investigation during the next few years. In addition to their usual complaints, the separate traders now claimed that the company had agreed to “a collusive Neutrality with the French,” so “that the Separate Traders should of consequence be either hindred from the Trade of those Parts or become a Prey to our Enemies.” They noted that this design was especially treacherous while Britain was at war with France. The board asked colonial officials to provide accounts of how many slaves had been imported by the company and private traders between 1698 and 1707.10 In response, the company’s directors solicited petitions from British manufacturers and colonial planters, and even provided a sample petition for the planters to sign. The petition did not ask for a specific way of settling the slave trade but merely requested that the trade be settled so “that a sufficient number of Negroes may be had on ye Coast [of Africa] on moderate terms, by which your Petitioners may hope for a constant supply at reasonable prices.” Planters from Barbados, Montserrat, and Nevis signed the petition on the African Company’s behalf. The use of such petitioning and lobbying techniques suggests that the directors of the African Company by the early eighteenth century were more politically astute and in tune with structural political changes than some historians have suggested. The separate traders utilized the same strategy, and provided sample petitions to the colonies and to outlying ports and manufacturing towns and shires across England, many of which were answered requesting that the African trade “remain free and open.”11
Although some planters were willing to sign petitions in support of the company’s position, most responses from the colonies did not help the company’s cause. According to the numbers provided by colonial governors, since the Ten Percent Act became law in 1698, separate traders had imported approximately 88,108 slaves to Barbados, Jamaica, and Antigua. The separate traders took advantage of this news and quickly published a pamphlet containing this information in 1709. Later that year the Board of Trade issued a report to the Commons, which stated the African Company claimed to have delivered 17,760 slaves to the colonies from 1698 to 1707. It also accepted the wildly overinflated claims of the separate traders that they had brought 160,950 slaves to the colonies during the same time period. Historian David Eltis maintains that the total number of slaves brought in British ships to the English West Indies for the period 1691–1707 probably totaled 137,494, so clearly these numbers were false. The board blamed the increased prices for slaves not on the Ten Percent Act but on the hazards of trading during wartime. Finally, the report determined that that although the exact state of the African Company’s finances remained unclear (in part because the company hesitated to share such information with the board), based on the impressions of the separate traders, they proffered that the company “is reduced so very low, that it will be impossible (upon the Foot they now stand) for them to carry on that Trade.” The African Company later complained “that the separate traders had formed a premeditated design, to impose upon the Lords Commissioners [of Trade] & consequently upon the whole nation … to magnify the value of their own yearly exports to Africa, & the number of Negroes yearly imported by them to the plantations, by fallacious computations, founded merely upon fictitious suppositions.” Although the board made a few corrections to its calculations, it paid little heed to the company’s concerns.12
THE PUBLIC DEBATE
The African Company and the separate traders also presented their cases to the public in the form of published pamphlets and broadsides. Like the debates of the 1690s, the public discussion over the slave trade in the early 1700s indicated significant popular interest in the politics of slavery and the slave trade’s imperial ramifications. This time around, however, pamphlets in favor of reinstating the African Company’s monopoly outnumbered those mobilized by the separate traders. From 1704 to 1714 approximately ninety-one publications were printed in support of the company and its monopoly, and about sixty-seven were published in opposition to the company’s position, bringing the total for the decade to 158. In contrast, during the 1690s, only about forty pamphlets in total were published, six on behalf of the company and thirty-four by the separate traders and their allies.13 This increase in overall numbers indicated that both sides recognized the importance of appealing to a broad public audience to promote their positions.
The flipped numerical difference between the pro- and anti-company positions by the early 1700s, however, brings into question some conclusions that scholars have made about separate-trader success in the wake of the Glorious Revolution. William Pettigrew has argued that the separate traders, as a group, were better able to respond to structural changes to political institutions in the wake of the revolution, such as the ascendancy of parliamentary rule, the rise of interest groups, and the use of political propaganda, and that this contributed to their commercial success. Although this might have been the case during the 1690s, the discrepancy in the numbers of pamphlets published by the two sides during the early 1700s indicates that the African Company and its supporters might have been less impervious to changes in political culture than it might at first appear. The company, after all, turned to such adept political propagandists as Charles Davenant and Daniel Defoe to promote its cause, illustrating a mature understanding of the nature of politics and the importance of public opinion by the time of Queen Anne’s reign.14 In addition, as noted above, the company embraced such modern political tools as lobbying and soliciting petitions from various constituencies. The fact that the company actively sought support from planters and manufacturers, who were usually counted among its traditional enemies, indicates that it was better prepared to adapt to the changing political landscape by the early 1700s. In addition, the company might have had greater financial resources available to have such publications written and printed by the 1700s. It was also possible that the African Company felt much more threatened by the 1700s and understood the need to present its case widely. But it is clear that the company’s embrace of print and mobilizing prewritten petitions represented a greater readiness to come to terms with the new realities of British political culture, something the old Tory institution was by and large unwilling and unable to do in previous decades.
Scholars who have analyzed the slave-trade debates of the early 1700s have tended to lump them together with those of the 1690s. As in the 1690s, both sides in the early 1700s emphasized the importance of slavery to the colonies and of the colonies to the imperial economy. One pro-company pamphlet asserted in 1713, “Certainly the Plantation Trade is the most considerable Branch of the British Trade, that is the Sugar Plantations.” It continued, “the more the Sugar Colonies are improv’d, the greater the Importation must be, and so by consequence more Wealth Accrue to the Nation.” Also much as in the 1690s debates, the anti-monopolist side highlighted not only colonial reliance upon the home country, but an integrated vision of empire that emphasized mutual dependence and a kind of negotiated governance. Central to it all was colonial dependence on the forced labor of enslaved Africans, which drove the imperial economy. “The unspeakable Advantages that are continually flowing from her Majesty’s American Colonies into Great Britain,” one pamphlet claimed, “and how intirely the Prosperity of our West-India Plantations depend, beyond Exception, upon the African Trade, since they have no other way to occupy their Grounds, raise their Products, or manufacture their Commodities, but by hard Labour, and that not to be endur’d in such a sultry Climate by any but Negroes.”15
Despite these similarities to the pamphlets of the 1690s, there were some significant differences between the two sets of publications. For example, pamphlets published on behalf of the African Company in the 1700s demonstrated a keen awareness of the political situation it faced during the Whig Ascendancy of 1708–1710. One pamphlet remarked that by reporting inflated numbers to the Board of Trade, the separate traders hoped to “prejudice the Company and to gain Applause from the Lords Commissioners for Trade,” a recognition that the separate traders and the board acted together against the company’s interests. Similarly, many pro-company pamphlets argued that the numbers presented by the separate traders were overinflated and false. “The Separate Traders affirm, in Seven Years, they imported into the Plantations 150,000 Negroes,” read one pamphlet. This was pure fallacy. “No, if all those Negroes had been settled in the Plantations, there could have been no Complaint for want of Supply.” Charles Davenant simply stated, “their Computations are grossly erroneous.” In fact, he wrote, opening the trade had made it impossible to measure “how far (Nationally speaking) we may be either Gainers or Losers by [the slave trade].”16
Pro-company pamphlets in the early 1700s, like the few printed during the 1690s, emphasized the need to maintain forts and settlements in Africa to carry on the slave trade, especially because it was “the Practice of other Nations.” By the 1700s, however, writers emphasized the “Treachery and Falsehood of the Natives” as a major underlying reason why this was the case. “The Necessity of Forts to carry on the Trade is publickly owned; that Necessity is apparent: For the Country is Barbarous, Perfidious, Bloody and Cruel.” Forts and castles provided physical marketplaces to trade and form alliances with African traders in order to maintain “a constant co-ercive Power on the Coast, for curbing the natural Insolencies and Barbarity of the generality of their Tempers.” Separate traders might claim that forts and castles were not necessary, but according to Davenant “that’s but looking one way and rowing another; For if they speak their Minds plainly, it will be found that they slight these Forts merely with Design (if they could compass their ends with the Parliament) to get the Property of them, for little or nothing, to themselves.”17
The other main difference between the two sets of pamphlets was that both sides had a decade of an open slave trade to remark upon since the passage of the 1698 act. Pro-company publications claimed that the act had the detrimental effect of dividing the interests of British traders in Africa and repeatedly highlighted a necessity for control, order, and discipline that only a joint-stock company licensed by the government could provide. “The unbounded Liberty allowed, by the said Act, to all Persons whatsoever to Trade to Africa,” asserted one pamphlet, “without any uniform Influence, or pre-concerted Rules of Management, has rendered the British Interest on that Coast so divided, and the Consequences attending the different Methods of Trading there so very precarious.” The result, it claimed, was “the Natives of Africa have thereby an Opportunity of imposing what [prices] they please, as well upon the separate Traders, as upon the Company, to the general Prejudice of the Kingdom.” Daniel Defoe wrote in his defense of the company that in the wake of the Ten Percent Act, “The Coast of Afric was made a meer Common Fair, where every Ship’s Company endeavouring to circumvent and undersell one another.” The result, Defoe and numerous others maintained, was increased prices for slaves in Africa and in the colonies. One writer went so far as to claim that only a joint-stock company with a united interest could work to limit slave prices, and remarkably, slave mortality. “Are not the buying of them dear and the Mortality that frequently attends such Voyages too, much greater Causes of their high Prices, which a Company, being but one buyer, can only prevent.”18
According to pro-company pamphlets, the fierce competition created by the Ten Percent Act resulted in violence on the African coast among British merchants. The need for order was so severe, one writer maintained, “that nothing but a united Power upon the Coast of Africa can secure this Trade: Power, and the Purse, Force, and Merchandize must be united, and put into one and the same Hand.” Davenant went so far as to suggest that the African Company and the separate traders should form a united company, much like the two East India Companies had, in order to promote and better manage the trade without these divided interests. Not only did the Ten Percent Act promote chaotic conditions in West Africa, according to many pro-company pamphlets, it violated the company’s property rights by opening up access to its forts and castles in the first place. It was especially galling to the author of one pamphlet that Parliament had felt it was within its jurisdiction to violate those rights that had been granted by the Crown in previous generations. Worse, the Ten Percent Act did not provide nearly enough money for the upkeep of the company’s forts and castles. “It may be truly said,” lamented Davenant, “that the Nation has lost so much, by not having the Trade settled on a fixed and solid Constitution all this time.”19
Pamphlets produced in opposition to the company’s monopoly directly attacked these claims. “The [African] Natives of the Country are not so Treacherous and False as represented, nor do they at any Time offer the first Affront, so that there’s no need of Forts and Castles to keep them in Awe.” It continued, “If the Blacks Insult the Company’s Forts and Factories, and Detain their Provision, it is owing to the Companies Agents and Factors for Inraging them by their own Base Actions.” If prices had increased it was because of the violence and treachery of African Company agents, who scared off other traders and made the slave trade more expensive than in previous decades. The African Company’s claim that it needed buildings to form alliances with Africans was also dismissed as false. “’Tis fair Dealing with the Natives, and Justice,” maintained one leaflet, “and not Alliances with one King, to make War on another, that is the Foundation of all Commerce in the World.” Besides, these critics claimed, the company failed to properly maintain their buildings, despite the fact that the separate traders “pay so largely for the Protection of their Forts.” In fact, claimed another pamphlet, rather than offering protection to the separate traders who paid the 10 percent duty, the company’s agents in Africa offered “very ill Treatment” and “open Violence” to such an extent that the separate traders “dare not come near the English Settlements ashore; but are forced to trade with the Natives out at Sea.” Some suggested that ships of war rather than buildings would suffice to safeguard the trade.20
Some of the anti-company pamphlets also took on the idea that the African Company’s property had been violated through the Ten Percent Act. One claimed that Cape Coast Castle, the main base of the slave trade and owned by the African Company since the 1660s, in fact belonged to the nation as a whole. Cape Coast Castle, “is undoubtedly the Nation’s Property, being taken from the Dutch at the Nation’s Charge; for tho King Charles granted this Company a Patent for the sole Trade, exclusive of all others, together with that Place, that Patent was disregarded by the Parliament in 1698 and all the Settlements in Guinea render’d free for all English Men to live in.” Such claims seemed to confirm the African Company’s fears that its right to property had been compromised by the Ten Percent Act. Others suggested that if the forts and castles were not already nationalized, they should be in the future. One even argued Parliament had the authority of eminent domain to make it happen.21 This revealed a vision of the slave trade as not only in the national interest, but also so important as to be nationalized. According to this position, the company, through violent acts and poor management, had abdicated its authority over the trade and its own property.
The anti-monopolist pamphlets also disputed the argument that because other nations had forts and castles and joint-stock corporations to conduct trade in Africa, Britain should do the same. “The Practice of other Nations is like that of the English African Company, who use their Forts to the same Purpose,” claimed one broadsheet, “that is, chiefly to hinder the rest of the People of their own Nation to Trade where ever they can prevent them.” This practice, it was argued, should not be emulated by the British. Rather than actually doing something about Dutch or French competition, in fact, some anti-monopolist tracts claimed company agents protected “Dutch Interlopers, because I suppose they are well paid for their Pains.” Some also reiterated the separate-traders’ claim that the African Company had entered into a “neutrality” agreement with the French African company in 1704, alleging that the two companies had agreed to work together to suppress separate-trader access to African slave traders. Such “felonious Treaties” with “the open Enemies of Her Majesty” during wartime underscored the perception that the African Company, long associated with the Stuart monarchs and their connections to the court of the absolutist Louis XIV, had continued this perfidious union.22
Just as the separate traders had argued to the Board of Trade, anti-monopolist publications maintained that the African trade should not be managed by a joint-stock company. Some claimed the slave trade, “a Trade, upon the inlarging and improving whereof depends the Welfare of our West-India Plantations, and our Trade to New Spain,” was simply too important to be entrusted to a joint-stock company. In addition, the African Company had not provided the colonies with enough slaves, even at the height of its monopoly, and it continued to neglect the tobacco colonies of Virginia and Maryland. Limiting the African trade to a joint-stock company based in London would have the effect of neglecting outports, such as Bristol and Liverpool as well as all of Scotland. Some repeated the refrain that if a company was necessary for the trade, it should instead be organized as a regulated rather than a joint-stock company. “An open Trade,” one pamphlet argued, “has as direct a tendency to enlarge and improve, as the other has to cramp and destroy whatever is valuable in this Article.” Rather than promoting divided interests and a chaotic trading environment, anti-monopolist pamphlets emphasized that competition created by the Ten Percent Act was good for trade. “Nothing conduces so much to the Increase of Trade, as Emulation among Traders,” claimed one sheet. “When Trade is confined to a few, who are in no Apprehension to be outdone by any Rival, they are not likely to take extraordinary Pains to improve it. Whereas when many carry on a Trade, their Industry and Ingenuity are always at work to out vie one another.” Besides, claimed another, the African Company could hardly deny the fact that planters in the colonies “have always complained of this Monopoly, as a very burthensom Grievance, till laid open by Act of Parliament in 1698.”23 Such publications both for and against the African Company’s position demonstrated widespread public interest in the slave trade and its place in Britain’s imperial economy. For many, the imaginary of empire depended on the proper management of the slave trade.
THE POLITICS OF THE ASIENTO IN THE EARLY 1700S
For three years, the Whig-dominated Board of Trade sided with the separate traders and ensured that the Royal African Company would never again hold a monopoly on African trade or win more favorable terms than those provided by the Ten Percent Act. By 1710, however, Whig fortunes in the government began to change. Tories took advantage of popular dissatisfaction with another long, expensive war by focusing on the unevenness of military victories on the Continent. Most significantly, by 1709–1710 the country faced a significant credit crisis brought on by long-term debt and the increased costs of war. To fund the war effort, the government had to borrow money on increasingly poor terms. As Carl Wennerlind has argued, unlike previous credit crises, the financial emergency of 1709–1710 was especially troubling because of the new role public opinion played in the understanding and management of credit in Britain. At the same time, utilizing propaganda became an opportunity for politicians, financiers, and others to shape public opinion about credit according to their respective political and economic agendas. Whigs and Tories, as well as less obviously political groups, attempted to sway public opinion through the publication of books, pamphlets, and broadsides, and tried to place the blame for the crisis on their enemies and detractors.24 The debates on the status of the African Company and the slave trade coincided with this larger debate on the state of the national debt, the health of public credit, and what needed to be done about the crisis. As a result, politics continued to play a major role in the discourse about the place of slavery and the slave trade in the British empire.
Not surprisingly, Tories and their allies blamed profiteering by Whig grandees in charge of the Bank of England and the new United East India Company, both of which provided significant loans to the government to finance the war effort, for working to prolong the war and exacerbating the credit crisis. By the summer of 1710, financial instability spilled over into the political realm. In June 1710 Queen Anne removed Sunderland as secretary of state, which triggered a backlash from establishment Whigs who were concerned about the state of public credit in the wake of such significant political change. The following day, Sir Gilbert Heathcote, the longtime colonial merchant and current governor of the Bank of England, requested an audience with the queen. The bank had granted the government an enormous loan in 1709 to fund the war, and Heathcote, along with a delegation from the bank, cautioned the queen that any further alteration of her ministry or dissolving the current Parliament would destabilize the nation’s finances. For two months, Queen Anne made no further changes. In August, Heathcote, this time via Lord High Treasurer Godolphin, once again asked for an assurance that the ministry and Parliament would remain unchanged. This time his plan backfired, however, and Godolphin was summarily dismissed from office.25 The Tory leader Sir Robert Harley, soon to be named Earl of Oxford, became chancellor of the exchequer, and the following year was named Lord High Treasurer.
It was not an auspicious time to take over the reins of government, with the credit crisis deepening and public support of the war effort waning. But Harley took advantage of popular anti-Whig fervor, war weariness, and “Church in danger” sentiment by engineering a resounding Tory victory in parliamentary elections that October. This hardly solved the credit problem, however, because as Heathcote and others had warned, the creation of a Tory ministry and majority in the Commons significantly undermined public confidence in government bonds, especially among the wealthy Whigs who held them. Harley did, however, have a two-pronged strategy to address the credit crisis. The first was to wrest control of the financial establishment away from its traditional Whig base. In April 1711, the Bank of England and the United East India Company, the bastions of the Whig financial establishment, held elections for their directorships. In the heated political environment, both Whigs and Tories, the latter encouraged by Harley, presented a “ticket” of twenty-four men deemed acceptable for directorship positions. There was some overlap between the two tickets, and the lists did not represent a clear-cut Whig-Tory divide; as Gary De Krey and others have pointed out, there were a number of Whigs on the “Tory” slate endorsed by Harley. These Whigs, however, such as the merchants Sir James Bateman and Samuel Shepheard, had grown disaffected with the politics of the Whig establishment. In the end, the anti-establishment, anti-Whig candidates were not successful in either case. Their failed attempt to thwart the Whig leadership, however, was not forgotten by Harley and his associates, who moved forward on the second part of his plan to counter the financial and political power of the Whigs while addressing the nation’s credit crisis. One month prior to the directorship elections, Harley had introduced a proposal in the Commons for the creation of a joint-stock company that would absorb the government’s short-term war debt. The day after he made this proposal, however, Harley was stabbed by the French spy the Marquis de Guiscard and forced to convalesce for weeks. After his recuperation and the failure to engineer a takeover of the Bank and East India Company, Harley reintroduced his scheme for a new trading company in Parliament.26
Harley’s plan called for the creation by Parliament of a joint-stock company, the subscribers to which would be the holders of the nation’s short-term war debt, which had been recently determined to be over £9.4 million. This group included not only larger bondholders and creditors, but also smaller creditors to the army and navy, including soldiers and sailors who were owed pay by the government. They would exchange their debt for shares in the company, which would serve as a conduit to swap “debt for equity” to keep creditors happy, credit afloat, and money circulating. As an incentive for creditors/investors, the government would pay a rate of 6 percent interest on the debt exchanged for stock, and the company would be granted a monopoly on all trade to Spanish America, including the asiento. The “South Seas” continued to have a powerful hold on the British imagination as a bottomless source of potential wealth. As early as 1710–1711, when preliminary peace negotiations with France began, Harley knew that Britain would likely be granted the asiento at the close of the war. As one supporter at the time remarked, “I must admit it to be an uncommon method to raise the public credit by exposing to the whole world the [nation’s] immense debt, yet what ill consequence can it be, when the vast ocean of the South Seas, and the infinite treasures of America are (inter alia) assigned for that satisfaction?” Government creditors would earn money on their investments, and the nation’s debt would be funded.27
The creation of the South Sea Company in 1711 was the culmination of a number of political and economic circumstances that came together under Harley’s leadership. In the first instance, the company was meant to serve as a Tory counterweight to the power and influence of the wealthiest Whigs and their joint-stock companies, institutions from which Tories had largely been excluded. In order to keep Whigs out of directorships in the new company, Harley pushed for the first slate of directors to be appointed by the queen, which would essentially grant him and his associates the authority to choose the directors they wanted.28 A number of unsuccessful candidates for the directorships of the Bank of England and East India Company in April 1711 found themselves or their family members with positions in the new venture. Initial directors of the South Sea Company included Sir Theodore Janssen, a Tory financier; Sir Richard Hoare, a Tory City of London populist; John Blunt and Sir George Caswall, Tory financiers who had tried unsuccessfully to compete with the Bank of England with the Sword Blade Company; Edward Harley, Robert’s brother; Henry St. John, the Tory diplomat and politician soon to be appointed secretary at war; and Sir James Bateman and Samuel Shepheard, both London Whigs who had grown alienated by Heathcote’s governorship at the Bank of England and had been unsuccessful candidates on the anti-establishment slate. Solidifying his political ascendancy, the same month he introduced the South Sea Company scheme, Harley was named the Earl of Oxford and Lord High Treasurer of the queen’s ministry.29
The South Sea Company has been the focus of numerous historical and economic studies, most of which emphasize the infamous South Sea Bubble of 1720, in which the price of its stock skyrocketed on speculation of future profits and unceremoniously collapsed, with devastating effects on the British imperial economy. As a result, some scholars have downplayed the importance of trade, and especially the slave trade, to the reality of the scheme. This has changed in recent decades, as historians such as Colin Palmer, Carl Wennerlind, and Adrian Finucane have focused on the importance of the asiento to Britain’s imperial project, the credit crisis, and the functioning of overseas trade.30 They are right to emphasize that the company was not only founded with the explicit purpose of gaining access to lucrative Spanish American markets, but that it was established to manage the asiento. The government’s interest in winning the exclusive contract to provide the Spanish colonies with slaves went as far back as the 1660s and was directly connected to the perceived centrality of the African slave trade to Britain’s imperial economy, as well as the idea that Spanish American bullion could solve Britain’s financial woes. Few scholars, however, have focused on the connections between the foundation of the South Sea Company and the asiento and the contemporaneous public debate on the status of the African Company. But it is important to note that the issue of the asiento frequently appeared in the slave-trade debate. Many pro–African Company publications emphasized the necessity of a joint-stock company not only to supply the British colonies with adequate supplies of slaves, but for “making any advantageous Contracts with the Spaniards, or Portugueze, to furnish them with Negroes in their West Indies.” On the other hand, many anti-monopolist tracts argued that because of the asiento’s economic importance, the slave trade to both British and Spanish colonies should remain open to all who wished to participate.31
In the midst of the public debate over the African trade, in fact, one particularly interesting pamphlet was published in 1709 called Proposals for Raising a New Company for Carrying on the Trades of Africa and the Spanish West-Indies. The author, who presented himself as “neither a Guinea nor India Party Man,” saw the public debate and parliamentary investigation into the state of the African trade as an opportunity to reorganize the slave trade by “uniting the Trades to Guinea, and the Spanish West-Indies” into one company. “If we consider the Spanish Trade only,” the author elaborated, “and of what vast Advantage to the Nation the keeping to our selves the Assiento may be, which is no other way to be preserved than by the Preservation of this Trade; this Consideration is of it self sufficient to obviate all Pretences. By that, we shall have a perpetual Supply of Gold, Silver, and other useful Commodities; and by them procure the Balance of Trade on our side, which must otherwise inevitably fall to our Neighbours.” This was the political-economic position held by the Crown and the African Company since the Restoration. But instead of maintaining the old African Company, the author proposed the organization of “a new Fund, a new People, encouraged to be industrious, and united in one Bottom the better to reap the Fruits of their Industry.”32 According to this writer, it made sense to combine the interests and demands of the British and Spanish plantations into a new trading company whose primary concern was getting slaves across the Atlantic. The content of this pamphlet indicated that many in Britain recognized a connection between reorganizing the African trade and the opportunity that arose from the possibility of winning the asiento at the end of the war. Its appearance during the separate-trader debates indicates that the creation of the South Sea Company in 1711 with the explicit purpose of managing the asiento was implicated in wider popular discussions about the slave trade and the national interest.
Harley and his business associates in the South Sea Company understood that the slave trade was at the center of the nation’s attention. They also hoped to take advantage of the popular image of Spanish America as an endless source of riches. The asiento in particular was viewed by many as a potential gold mine for whoever held the contract. The South Sea Company was granted a charter in September 1711, giving it a monopoly on all trade to Spanish America, or the “South Seas,” even though neither Spain nor France, which now controlled much of New Spain, officially allowed foreigners to trade in their American territories. A few days later, the early peace negotiations to end the war were signed with France, and many in Oxford’s circle knew that Britain would be granted the asiento in the final peace.33
Not surprisingly, considering the highly partisan environment of the final years of the war, Oxford’s project met with serious opposition from a variety of constituencies. Many took issue with the riskiness of the venture and argued that despite the potential profitability of the Spanish American trade, “this New Company, as it stands constituted at present,” would not guarantee safe returns. Others warned that the men behind the company were well-known fraudsters and that the entire scheme was potentially criminal. In response, South Sea Company backers presented a variety of political, diplomatic, and economic arguments to promote the scheme. In the first instance, the company, through the exchange of its stock for outstanding debt, would help solve the nation’s looming credit crisis. Daniel Defoe, the Tory ministry’s chief propagandist-for-hire, argued that if the ministry had not addressed the issue of government debt, credit would have been devastated and the economy ruined. One anonymous pamphleteer maintained that “The Provision made for the Payment of the National Debts [by the company’s shares] cannot but produce a lasting Credit.” This author also argued that gaining access to Spanish American trade would result in gains for Britain, especially “real Treasure, such as Gold and Silver.”34
Many supporters also argued that the South Sea Company, by gaining access to the lucrative Spanish American market, would hinder Louis XIV’s designs for universal monarchy. Therefore the South Sea Company represented the most patriotic anti-French aspirations of the British nation. Upon claiming the Spanish Crown and Dominions for his grandson in 1702, Louis XIV secured the asiento for France for a period of ten years. The asiento in French hands represented Louis XIV’s most fearsome imperial designs and embodied the popular British perception of French perfidiousness. One pamphlet addressed the widespread Whiggish notion that the Tory ministry, which had risen to power on popular antiwar sentiment, would abandon Spain in peace negotiations and leave the Spanish Crown in French Bourbon hands. Nothing could be further from the truth, this writer claimed, trying to reassure an imaginary investor who contemplated selling his shares. “Be assur’d then, Sir, that the Present Ministry will never make any Peace, without the Concurrence of our Allies, nor without having Spain and the Indies restor’d to the [Habsburg] Emperor.”35
In a rhetorical move illustrating the connections between the origins of the South Sea Company and the debate over the status of the African Company, South Sea Company backers claimed that its control of the asiento would ultimately benefit the beleaguered African Company. Defoe maintained that only the African Company, because of its presence on the West African coast, “are capable to enter into Contracts for the supplying it [the asiento], and are alone capable of performing those Contracts.”36 This was exactly what Oxford seems to have had in mind. Although he entertained a proposal from the separate traders to execute a subcontract to procure slaves in late July 1713, in the end Oxford and the South Sea Company’s directors chose to work with the African Company, believing its existing infrastructure and established contacts would benefit the asiento. According to the terms worked out in 1713, the company would provide Spanish colonies with a certain amount of slaves per year, paying a duty to the Spanish Crown on each slave for the privilege of a guaranteed sale. After Parliament approved the Treaty of Utrecht in the spring of 1713, the two corporations forged an agreement where the African Company arranged to provide the Spanish colonies with forty-eight hundred slaves annually on behalf of the South Sea Company. The official agreement between the two companies was signed on October 20, 1713.37 The African Company no longer had a monopoly on the slave trade to Britain’s colonies, but it made political and economic sense to Oxford and his associates to trust it with fulfilling the asiento.
THE ROYAL AFRICAN COMPANY AND THE ASIENTO
Not surprisingly, the African Company viewed the asiento as a financial and political lifeline and an occasion to attempt to reexert its influence over imperial affairs. The company’s directors even agreed to “terms disadvantageous to themselves” in order to gain the contract. Nevertheless, hopes were high in the fall of 1713. “We shall omit no opportunity to strengthen our interest by Parliament or otherwise,” the directors wrote to their agents at Cape Coast Castle in October 1713, “and we hope this agreement with the South Sea Company will have a good effect and that a right use will be made of it by all our servants towards the promoting & establishment of our interest both in Africa and America.” And indeed, earlier that summer the African Company with the help of its new powerful ally convinced the House of Lords to reject a bill that had passed the Commons opening up the slave trade once and for all.38
It was significant, however, that Oxford created a new company to handle the asiento rather than granting it to the African Company in the first instance. This certainly demonstrated the African Company’s political and structural weaknesses by 1711, and occurred despite the fact that Oxford and the Tory-dominated Parliament and ministry were by and large supportive of the old corporation. Although the South Sea Company agreed to contract with the African Company, which could be interpreted to mean that Oxford and his allies saw the scheme as a way to help the struggling corporation, William Pettigrew dismisses this as unlikely. It is crucial to keep in mind that the South Sea Company was founded first and foremost to solve the problem of government debt and the nation’s credit crisis. As its financial difficulties of the 1690s demonstrated, the African Company could not have been used for such a massive undertaking; a new joint-stock company, with new incentives, had to be created. The asiento, while central to the scheme, was the means by which investors and creditors would be enticed into subscribing. In other words, the slave trade, and as Carl Wennderlind has recently argued, the place of the slave trade and the “South Seas” in the British popular imagination, was the means to attract creditors and solve the nation’s debt and credit crisis.39 Considering the African Company’s dire financial straits, not to mention its ideological associations explored in the previous chapter, it was clear that Oxford could hardly trust his new scheme to save the nation’s credit problems to the old African Company.
Some historians have argued that because the African Company was preoccupied by the prospects of the asiento trade, its directors were essentially “distracted” while the separate traders not only continued to chip away at the company’s market share but also created a “legislative vacuum,” ensuring the expiration of the 1698 Ten Percent Act in 1712. The African Company, however, hardly seemed “distracted” by the South Sea Company’s overtures in 1711–1712. The first problem appears to be one of chronology. The official contract between the two companies for managing the asiento did not get approved until the spring of 1713, a year after the expiration of the Ten Percent Act. As Tim Keirn has noted, it was only “by 1713 [that] the African Company was concentrating its energies on gaining the subcontract” for the asiento. In addition, there is ample evidence to suggest that the African Company’s supporters hoped that the Ten Percent Act would expire almost as much as the separate traders did. One pro-company pamphlet published in 1712, after outlining a litany of problems with the Ten Percent Act, concluded that “The Company humbly hope therefore, that their Long-sufferings and Oppression occasion’d by the aforesaid hard Law, shall now end and expire, and be buried with it.” In addition, as soon as the act expired in July 1712, the African Company tried to take advantage of the resulting confusion to claim that “being now restored to their former Rights, [the company] do give notice and warning, that if any interlopers shall enter on the Company’s possession of any of their lands, rivers, islands, ports or havens on the African Coasts,” they would be prosecuted.40
Most important, however, the African Company secured legislation in June 1712 forming a “union” with a number of its major creditors, which helped the company’s financial position. Daniel Defoe, admittedly hardly a neutral source in his role as African Company propagandist, went so far as to assert that it was the separate traders who were distracted by their own desire to establish a regulated company that allowed this legislation to pass. The separate traders, Defoe claimed, “took little Notice of this Bill, as being not at all concern’d in what the Company and their Creditors might do together.” Defoe insisted that “Upon this Act, as upon a steady Foundation, the present New Building of the Company stands fixt, and to the Disappointment of the Enemies of our Commerce is like to stand.” Meanwhile, the separate traders’ bill to create a regulated company “was thrown out.” Defoe continued, “The African Company, standing still, and as may be said only looking on, saw themselves unexpectedly establish’d by the Defeat of their Enemies on a better Foundation than they were before.”41
Defoe’s account is obviously a biased and overly optimistic interpretation of events that transpired in the summer of 1712. But it is likely that the company’s union with its creditors seemed to offer just as much hope as the asiento contract would the following year. The 1712 act, according to Defoe, put a stop to the separate traders’ attempts to ruin the African Company. It was in part because of this alliance with its creditors, for example, that the company managed to urge the defeat of the bill opening the slave trade in June 1713, and it motivated the company to petition to gain the asiento subcontract. In 1714, two years after the agreement with the creditors, one pro-company propagandist noted that this “late Act of Parliament in Favour of their Creditors, … has revived [the company].” These actions and legislative successes, however sanguine, do not seem to have come from a company too distracted by the promise of the riches of the asiento to notice its declining fortunes. While it is certainly true that neither the union with its creditors nor its contract with the South Sea Company were enough to save the African Company financially or revive its role in the slave trade, this was not necessarily obvious to most interested parties during 1711–1714. The separate traders very well might have wanted a “legislative vacuum” and inaction to ensure the expiration of the Ten Percent Act to guarantee a de-regulated slave trade. But the African Company hardly seems to have been caught off guard by the separate traders’ strategy or the promise of the asiento by the turn of the eighteenth century.42
ASIENTO IN PRACTICE
The asiento scheme, however, never worked for either company. The contract began on May 1, 1713, but at first Spain ordered officials in its colonies not to recognize the contract until peace was officially declared, which did not happen until 1714. Governor Archibald Hamilton of Jamaica reported that as a result, Spanish merchants were unwilling to do business in his colony. The South Sea Company wanted to delay the official start of the contract until May 1, 1714, arguing that it should not have to pay the import duty on slaves if the peace had yet to be declared. The company, however, was unable to convince the Spanish Crown to alter the terms of the contract. In addition, the company suffered temporary setbacks with the removal of Oxford from the ministry in the spring of 1714 and death of Queen Anne that August. The directors, however, managed to continue to convince investors that the company’s trade would restore the nation’s credit, and by the fall of 1714 it had regained some of its lost confidence. But the African Company was hardly in a position to help the South Sea Company fulfill the asiento contract. There were numerous bureaucratic and logistical difficulties, and arguments frequently erupted between the two companies over payments for shipments to and from Africa. They frequently had to hire arbitrators to settle financial disagreements, which resulted in a litigious mess.43
In addition to these logistical problems, there was sustained opposition to the asiento from planters in the British Caribbean colonies. There was a long tradition of resistance by colonial planters and privateers to the African Company’s practice of selling slaves to the Spanish, and the asiento in British control did not change this pervasive attitude. According to colonial planters, the asiento trade diminished the number of slaves in British colonial markets, which resulted in raising prices for those few slaves that were available. Colonists frequently complained to imperial authorities that the company sold the most able Africans to the Spanish, leaving them with the “refuse.” The main problem for colonists in Jamaica, however, was the fact that the asiento controlled by the South Sea Company significantly cut into their own market. Many Jamaican planters, merchants, and officials had achieved substantial profits from illegally selling slaves to the Spanish. This was the reason, according to some pro–African Company pamphlets, why many in that colony wanted the slave trade to remain open. South Sea Company’s agents and directors agreed with this assessment and complained to imperial authorities that the contraband slave trade continued to flourish from Jamaica, despite the monopoly. In May 1715, the South Sea Company’s Court of Directors asked Secretary of State James Stanhope to order “commanders of His Majesty’s ships [to be] prohibited from carrying over Negroes to the Spanish Coast on any account whatsoever,” unless they were South Sea Company ships.44
The South Sea Company’s potential to cut into colonial merchant profits motivated the Jamaicans to obstruct the asiento in a variety of ways. The South Sea Company, like many of those who held the contract before it, used Jamaica as a depot to “refresh” slave cargoes with food, water, and medical care. Jamaica was also regularly used as a marketplace for Spanish merchants to come and purchase slaves to sell in New Spain. In December 1715 the assembly passed “a duty of forty shillings p head on all Negroes that shall be thence exported to the Spanish Coast.” Company directors quickly petitioned for its repeal and warned that if such duties remained in place, it “will be so very burdensome and destructive to the Company” that it would be forced to “proceed directly from Africa to the Spanish Ports with their Negroes altho’ sickly to their damage,” avoiding Jamaica or any other British colony altogether. According to the colony’s agents in London, the assembly lowered the duty to twenty shillings, not wanting to hinder the trade. This duty, they insisted, had “generally [been] laid for twenty years past.” If anyone had a right to complain, they continued, it was Jamaican merchants and residents who depended upon trade with the Spanish. The following fall the assembly renewed the duty, and in October 1717 the company petitioned George I to repeal the act. For their part, the men of the Jamaica Assembly contended that not only did the asiento take “merchantable” slaves away from British planters, but previous holders of the contract had willingly paid the duty for the privilege of trading on the island.45
The King-in-Council asked the Board of Trade to investigate, and in December 1717 the board concluded that although the Jamaican planters had the right to impose export duties in order to raise funds for the colony, “it cannot be reasonable that they should lay a tax upon Negroes landed there by the South Sea Company for refreshment, … nor can precedents of the like duty drawn from former times, whilst the Assiento was in the hands of foreigners.” The King-in-Council repealed the act in January 1718 but indicated that Jamaica could pass an act imposing a duty on slaves exported from the island, just not on those who had been landed for “refreshment.” Over the course of the next two years, Jamaica proved to be such a hostile environment for the South Sea Company that it moved its operations to Barbados by the end of the decade.46
Despite its inauspicious beginnings, the South Sea Company managed to transport a sizable proportion of slaves across the Atlantic during its early years, delivering between 14 percent and 25 percent of all slaves brought by English ships between the years 1714 and 1718. In addition, its stock price continued to slowly increase in value. But major difficulties remained. The main obstacle to success lay in icy relations between Britain and Spain, which resulted in war being declared again in 1718. This put a temporary stop to the asiento trade and left the South Sea Company in desperate financial straits, which at least one historian has argued left open the possibility for the South Sea Bubble in 1720.47 But in the short term, Oxford’s project succeeded in restoring confidence in the nation’s credit. The reliance on popular understandings of the economic importance of the transatlantic slave trade as the means to achieve this goal was an indication of the central role slavery and the slave trade played in the British popular imagination as well as in important diplomatic, political, and economic policy decisions. Although Britain would hold the contract until 1739, the utter failure of the South Sea Company and its partner, the Royal African Company, to fulfill the terms of the asiento during its early years was a testament to the inability of the two joint-stock companies to operate effectively. It also indicated the determination of colonial planters and merchants and their allies in Britain to obstruct the South Sea Company’s activities in British colonies and to keep the slave trade to the British and Spanish colonies free from monopolistic interference.
CONCLUSION
The South Sea Company’s main purpose of solving the problem of the nation’s staggering war debt by procuring the asiento indicated that slavery in the colonies and the transatlantic slave trade were perceived by a significant portion of the British public to be key to the economic well-being of the British empire by the early eighteenth century. Most important, British control of the asiento was a major indication of the British state’s complete acceptance of slavery and the slave trade as central to the British imperial project. The creation of the South Sea Company in 1711 was connected to popular debates and discussions about slavery, the slave trade, and the status of the Royal African Company, which had been taking place since the 1690s. The separate traders and their colonial merchant-planter allies had successfully argued that an open slave trade to the British colonies was in the national interest. The British slave trade would remain the one large deregulated colonial trade for the remainder of the eighteenth century. But the slave trade to Spanish colonies, according to Tories like Oxford and his associates, needed monopoly control. The formation of the South Sea Company and the asiento represented Oxford’s vision of empire, which was in some ways a holdover from the old Stuart imperial ideal, especially of relying on Spanish wealth for Britain’s economic and imperial prosperity. The perceived importance of the asiento to Britain’s economic well-being contributed to Britain’s dominance of the transatlantic slave trade to all European colonies for the remainder of the eighteenth century.