London’s Links with Slavery

Peter began by saying that when he wrote his book about the history of the Port of London it left him with unanswered questions, including the connections between the men who created the West India Docks and slavery. His study of the subject is still an ongoing project and this talk is a summary of what he has learnt so far.

In the summer of 2020 the widely reported toppling of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol took place. That prompted Tower Hamlets Council to remove Robert Milligan’s statue, which stood outside the Museum of London Docklands. Other institutions connected with men who had made money from slavery have since decided to rename themselves, or remove statues and portraits, or make statements on the issue.

This sequence of incidents was sparked by the death in the U.S. of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter movement. That caused an upsurge in the public’s consciousness of Britain’s past involvement in slavery. Men who had previously been seen as great public figures were suddenly vilified. Major institutions, such as Lloyd’s of London, have since apologised for their past involvement in the slave trade.

The slave trade that took place in the 16th to 19th centuries created one of the greatest migrations in the history of the world, moving perhaps 11 million people out of Africa towards the New World, many of whom died before they arrived.

The main European nations employed in the slave economy were Portugal, Spain, Britain, France and the Netherlands. Spain never developed outposts on the African coast so was rarely directly involved in the shipping of slaves to their colonies, instead contracting it to Portuguese, Genoese, French or English merchants.

During that time the nation carrying the greatest number of slaves to the Americas was Portugal. They were involved in the trade for a much longer period than Britain and for much of that time supplied both their own settlements in Brazil and the Spanish colonies. Yet, looking at just the 18th century Britain was the leading slave-trading nation during that period. Between the mid-17th to the early 19th century 3.4 million slaves were transported from Africa to the British colonies, on British ships, mostly departing from London, Liverpool and Bristol.

Slaves were shipped in horrendous and unsanitary conditions and often treated quite cruelly. There was a high mortality rate while crossing the Atlantic, what was called the Middle Passage, that is the second leg of a triangular voyage for the ship. An average of 23% died during the voyage itself in the latter part of the 17th century due to the terrible conditions on board. Of the 3.4m slaves shipped by British vessels, 450,000 did not survive the crossing. The working conditions of slaves in the plantations was tough, their treatment was harsh, and life expectancy short.

The English colonisation of the Americas began in the early 17th century. There were various unsuccessful attempts to establish colonies but those that survived were: the early colonies of the North American mainland; Bermuda in the Atlantic; the Leeward Islands of St. Kitts, Nevis, Antigua and Montserrat; and Barbados.

Each of these has its own individual story of colonisation but what they have in common is that all of them were established with Letters Patent from James I or Charles I. In the main it was private companies, aristocrats, or merchants who financed the colonisation, and James and Charles benefitted in some way from it.

By the 1630s there were small numbers of enslaved Africans in each of the North American colonies. Yet slavery did not really become widespread in the North American colonies until the 18th century and relatively few of the slaves arriving there then were on ships from London. It is in the English West Indian colonies where slavery first became prevalent and where London ships carried by far the greatest number of slaves.

In the early decades of the 17th century tobacco grown in Virginia was fetching a high price on the London market. The investors who funded the colonies of the West Indies were hoping to make their fortunes by also growing it on those islands. Land was cleared and crops planted but the soil and climate proved less conducive and the tobacco was of poor quality compared with that of Virginia.

In the 17th century it took at least a month, and sometimes several months, to sail from England to the Americas. The journey was not only long but also dangerous. Vessels were often shipwrecked; captured by pirates; or passengers and crew became ill and died during the voyage. The colonists relied on merchant ships to visit to bring people and materials, and return to England with their exports. But when the tobacco of the West Indies failed to fetch a good price on the London market the merchants lost interest in sending supply ships and the West Indian colonies struggled to survive.

James Drax arrived in Barbados in 1627 on the first ship that brought settlers from England. It was then a deserted and forested island so he spent his first days there living in a cave until he could build himself a shack. He cleared some forest and started to grow tobacco, but the quality was too poor to sell so in 1640 Drax sailed to a Dutch colony in Brazil to learn about the cultivation of sugarcane.

Sugarcane is difficult to grow, and it is complicated and expensive to produce sugar from the cane. The Portuguese had the necessary knowledge and skills and had been producing it in Brazil. In the 1630s the Portuguese sugar-producing areas were captured by the Dutch and they in turn learnt the skills. Drax took that knowledge from the Dutch back to Barbados and started to experiment.

Until the mid-17th century food in England was sweetened with honey. Very small amounts of sugar were imported but it was an expensive luxury, which only the wealthy could afford. The experiments by Drax were successful. Within the space of just a few years Barbados was exporting huge amounts of sugar back to London, much of which was re-exported to other European countries. The English consumed large amounts of sugar, helped by the importation of coffee from the Middle East and tea from China. Very quickly sugar became the single largest commodity import into Britain.

Drax became immensely rich and moved back to London and managed his plantations in Barbados from his home in Hackney. At the time of his death he was the largest plantation owner in the West Indies with over 300 slaves. Those sugar plantations were passed down through the family and are now owned by his descendant, the wealthy Conservative MP Richard Drax… although of course no longer worked by slaves.

The West Indian sugar producers also discovered that a bi-product of the refining process was rum and that provided another valuable export. The economy of Barbados was transformed and the entire island was soon given over to growing sugarcane and producing sugar and rum. Land changed hands for vast sums of money. Fortunes were made and the leading plantation owners became some of the richest people in the English-speaking world. For the remainder of the 17th century Barbados was the jewel in the crown of all the English colonies.

The other islands of the West Indies, both English and French, followed the lead of Barbados. Sugar had become such a valuable commodity that by the next decade of the 17th century wars were taking place between the English, Dutch and French to capture Caribbean islands, or for the right to ship sugar to Europe, or to at least disrupt the supply of the rival country.

Planting and harvesting of sugarcane was back-breaking work and the processing of sugar was extremely hot and dangerous. When Drax visited the Dutch in Brazil he would have witnessed how African slaves were imported for the work.

The Guinea Company was established in the early 17th century by a group of London investors to exploit trade with Africa, particularly gold and ivory. By the 1640s they had developed a good understanding of the African markets and built relationships with local traders. When the plantation owners of Barbados needed slaves, the Guinea Company were ideally placed to supply them, which they began doing in 1641.

Due to the way the Atlantic’s Trade Winds and currents propelled sailing ships in a circle from England to the west coast of Africa, across the mid-Atlantic to the Caribbean, and then back to England, Barbados was anyway a useful stopping-off point for ships in the African trade.

George Downing, after whom Downing Street is named, then living in the colony of Massachusetts, wrote with envy that the colony of Barbados was importing a thousand slaves each year.

The timing of the production of sugar was fortuitous for the settlers of Barbados for several reasons:

1) The conflict between the Portuguese and Dutch in Brazil had disrupted supplies of sugar to Europe, providing a commercial opportunity.

2) The Barbadians had failed to profit from tobacco and were barely surviving by exporting ginger, indigo and cotton, so they were eager to find a more lucrative produce.

3) The Guinea company had built the necessary knowledge and contacts in Africa to supply slaves.

4) The settlers of Barbados had failed to build up enough capital to invest in expensive facilities such as boiling houses and mills to produce sugar and to buy slaves. But London’s merchants were eager to buy sugar so the Guinea Company were willing to supply slaves and materials on credit.

5) At the same time as the sugar industry was developing in Barbados the home country was embroiled in civil war. The future was uncertain, and the wealthy were nervous about investing in England. They looked for safe havens abroad, so they were happy to buy plantations and invest in the necessary resources to produce sugar in Barbados.

Until this point colonies had been established by investors and those seeking a better life elsewhere. The settlers developed their plantations and enjoyed free trade, particularly with the Dutch, without interference from England. That all changed with the defeat of Charles I in the Civil War. As far as the Cromwellian government was concerned the colonies were for the benefit of the mother country and they wanted control from Westminster.

In 1651 the first of the Navigation Acts was passed, which restricted trade with the colonies to British ships. It was designed to exclude the Dutch from trading with the colonies, and would initiate war between Britain and the Dutch states. But the Navigation Act was an important step towards Britain eventually ruling the waves.

The English sugar-producing colonies were small islands. The Cromwellian regime wanted to expand the number of lucrative colonies in the West Indies and, for the first time, the British government took direct action to capture and occupy a colony of another European nation. Cromwell sent a naval force to capture the large Spanish island of Hispaniola. It didn’t exactly go to plan… Cromwell didn’t succeed in capturing Hispaniola but instead ended up with the Spanish colony of Jamaica, which at that time was a completely undeveloped island. Nevertheless, it was far larger in size than the older English island colonies and was able to provide as much sugar as could be consumed.

The Guinea Company had limited resources at its disposal and, despite its legal monopoly, always faced the problem of interlopers who defied the company’s monopoly. One of those was the London merchant Maurice Thomson. In the 1640s he turned from poacher to gamekeeper and joined the Guinea Company.

In the meantime, various London merchants, led by Stepney-born Simon Vassall, had petitioned the government to end the Guinea Company’s monopoly. Vassall had a rather colourful career. He was a merchant and member of London’s Levant Company and was instrumental in developing the colonies of Virginia and Massachusetts. While serving as an MP for the City of London he was at the same time imprisoned for forcing people to become indentured servants who were sent to the colonies against their will, effectively white slavery. The Vassall family were to continue in the slave business for nearly 200 years.

Instead of ending the Guinea Company’s monopoly, in 1651 the Commonwealth government granted it with a new charter but for a smaller part of the African coast, which, importantly from our point of view, excluded some of the main slave markets. Thus, London merchants such as Thomson, Vassall and others were then able to legally operate slave-trading activities.

In 1657 Thomson and a group of those involved in the slave trade and colonial plantations effectively took over the management of the East India Company and immediately merged the Guinea Company into its operations.

At the Restoration in 1660, Charles II refused to recognise the Guinea Company’s most recent charter, which had been granted by the Commonwealth government. It was also the view of the new Restoration government that trade with Africa was too important to be left to merchants and should therefore become an instrument of the state. Thus, the Guinea Company’s charter was not extended and instead the Company of Royal Adventurers into Africa was formed in its place, headed by the King’s brother, James, Duke of York, the future King James II.

Initially the main objective was to search for gold mines in Africa, and the original charter failed to even mention slaves. The search for gold mines proved fruitless, so very soon buying slaves in Africa and selling them in the colonies became the main trade.

The company was poorly managed by the King’s courtiers at Whitehall and ran at a loss. In 1663 it was restructured and a new charter granted. This time shares in the company were opened up to anyone who could afford to buy them and thus the shareholders included many of London’s merchants and wealthy commoners. For the first time in a royal charter this new royal patent stated that the company had a monopoly in “negroes” and “slaves,” brought from Africa.

Since the time of the Guinea Company, slaves had been sold to plantation owners on credit. Typically, they would be delivered and payment made in sugar the following season. But the more slaves the Royal Adventurers delivered the more they were owed, yet they often found debts difficult to recover. Soon the company was in financial difficulties. Even worse, during the Anglo-Dutch war that began in 1665 the Dutch were seizing the company’s ships. The company became insolvent and for several years merely acted as a shell, selling licences to independent London merchants to trade with Africa and the West Indies.

In 1672 the Company of Adventurers was succeeded by the Royal African Company. As with the Company of Adventurers before it, it was founded by a group of courtiers but they were gradually replaced by London merchants, with their headquarters at Africa House in the City. Again, the Duke of York was the governor. The Royal African Company derived about three-fifths of its income from the slave trade.

Slave traders acquired their captives from tribal kings and merchants along the African coast, who in turn had taken them as prisoners of war from rival tribes further in the interior. The slaves sent to the West Indies were inhabitants of various locations in West Africa and may have been marched hundreds of miles before being sold to a European slave ship.

The English monopoly companies – the Guinea Company, the Royal Adventurers, and the Royal African Company – established small trading bases at various locations along the African coast known as factories. They also kept more permanent and secure forts where goods and captives could be held before shipment across the Atlantic. During the time of the Royal African Company their main fort was at Cape Coast Castle on what is now the coast of Ghana.

Until the early 18th century London dominated the slave trade to the English colonies. It was the home port of the monopoly companies, which were largely managed by London merchants and courtiers.

But another important reason for London’s dominance of the business was that it was an entrepot through which goods flowed in and out. The first part of each voyage went to Africa with goods to trade for slaves. Those ships were sent out from London with a range of merchandise that included fabrics and other goods that had been brought to London from the Far East by the East India Company, as well as metals and other products imported into London from Holland and the Baltic.

The Royal African Company, like the Guinea Company and Royal Adventurers before it, faced numerous problems during its time. Wars with the Dutch disrupted its business, it extended far too much credit to plantation owners that turned into bad debt, and it failed to control interlopers from undermining its trade. By the end of the 17th century the company was effectively bankrupt.

Plantation owners were complaining they weren’t being supplied with enough labourers, and independent merchants were lobbying Parliament to end the company’s monopoly. Significantly, merchants from Bristol and Liverpool were clamouring to join the trade. The Royal African Company’s monopoly patent expired in 1698 and was not renewed. The company continued well into the 18th century, bringing back to London gold to be minted into guinea coins. But it couldn’t compete with independent merchants and gradually faded into insignificance. That effectively ended London’s dominance of the slave trade. In the 1730s Bristol overtook London in the slave trade, which in turn was overtaken by Liverpool, which gradually became the dominant port for slave voyages.

However, London, as the centre of finance and government, continued to play a key role in the slave economy. Also, during the course of the 18th century London overtook Amsterdam as the main European entrepot for sugar, and thus a large percentage of the produce from the colonial slave plantations flowed through London, with onward sale to other markets.

The Royal African Company did have one last burst of activity in the slave trade. As part of the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, following the War of Spanish Succession, Britain was given the right to supply slaves to the Spanish colonies in the Americas. The contract was sold to the South Sea Company, based in the City, who in turn purchased the captives from the Royal African Company. 54,000 slaves were shipped to the Spanish Americas during the period 1713 until 1731.

Doing long-distance international trade was a complicated business. Knowledge had to be gained as to when, where and how to trade in Africa and the West Indies. Ships and crews had to be hired, exported goods acquired, and everything insured. The sugar and rum returned from the West Indies had to be sold in London.

To achieve all this, merchants gathered together in the City, at the Royal Exchange and at particular coffee-houses. Initially those dealing in the Africa and West Indian trade met at the Cardinal’s Cap tavern at the junction of Cornhill and Lombard Street. Later they moved to Pasqua Rosée’s Head coffee-house in St. Michael’s Alley off Cornhill, which first opened in 1652 and was at some point, renamed the Jamaica Coffee-house.

Information such as ship-wrecks was posted on its walls, as well as news of runaway slaves in London. The Jamaica Coffee House continued as the main meeting place of West India merchants and plantation owners well into the 19th century and it continues on the same site today as the Jamaica Wine House.

Those who met at the Jamaica Coffee-house were part of what became known as the West India Interest, a powerful lobby group in London that fought for the privileges of the slave traders and plantation owners. By the 18th century some of them were the most respected grandees of the City of London, and in Parliament.

By the 18th century Britain had become addicted to sugar, grown throughout the British West Indies. The leading plantation owners became fabulously wealthy. They no longer wanted to live in the colonial backwaters and instead began to relocate to England where they could marry into aristocracy, build grand town mansions, acquire country estates, and establish dynasties. Some stayed in the West Indies but sent their sons to be educated in England, such as at Westminster school and Oxford University. There was an increasing number of absentee landlords - the sugar barons - leaving the management of the plantations to local overseers.

Some of the plantation owners and slave-traders became pillars of the business community and society in general. They used their fortunes for philanthropic and cultural activities and were therefore highly respected. To quote the Museum of London: “Such was the reach of the slave economy, and so heavily integrated was it into British life, that seemingly innocuous things like botany, hospitals, and even lifeboats, were funded by it.”

As well as being the start and end point of many slave voyages, London was also the main financial hub of the trade. Its trading houses, banks and underwriters provided finance and insurance for the ships and cargoes, and raised the letters of credit. London’s banks lent money to the plantation owners to buy slaves and cultivate more land. The prosperity and continuation of the slave trade was therefore of utmost importance for the solvency of London’s financial institutions. There were a number of London bankers and financiers who were directly involved in the slave business, including various governors and directors of the Bank of England.

For the owners of the colonial plantations, the financiers, the merchants, and the slave traders, it was vital to have people in power in Britain to make connections with the government, to lobby Parliament, to frame legislation, and protect their trade. It helped to have one of their number as the Lord Mayor of London.

Until 1885 the City of London was represented in the House of Commons by four MPs at any one time. They were typically wealthy businessmen… and they always voted to protect their business interests. In the last two decades of the 17th century, 23 MPs were shareholders in the Royal African Company, of which 16 of them represented the City of London.

By the end of the 18th century a small number of individual traders and partnerships dominated the London-based slave trade but as far as I can see it was never their sole interest. It was just a diversification of their general business affairs.

An example is Calvert, Camden & King who were London’s leading slave-trading company during the last quarter of the 18th and early 19th centuries. The firm was based at the Minories, near the Tower of London, with operations at Wapping. Many local businesses in Wapping were either service providers to the firm, or customers. Although located in London they traded globally, including at least 77 slave voyages over a period of thirty years until 1808, carrying 22,000 slaves to Jamaica and other islands. Several members of this operation diversified into insurance and three of them were founders of the Lloyd’s of London insurance market.

As the 18th century progressed there was a small but vocal minority who questioned the morality of the use of slaves. To protect their interests those involved in slavery came together in London to form the Society of West India Planters & Merchants, later renamed the West India Committee. Many of the West India Committee entered Parliament to resist any change in laws that would disadvantage its members. By the latter 18th century there were at least 40 MPs sitting in the House of Commons with involvement in the slave economy.

One of the first to campaign against the slave trade was the civil servant Granville Sharp. He had been horrified when in 1765 he came across a slave in London who had been brought from Barbados by his master and then beaten so badly he was left near-blind.

In 1782 the slave ship Zong was crossing the Atlantic when its captives and crew started to become ill and to die. The captain took the decision to throw 137 sick slaves overboard and claim on insurance for their loss. The insurance company appealed and in a case held at the London Guildhall, which inspired Turner to create a celebrated painting, Lord Justice Mansfield ruled that in law a slave was simply a chattel, no different to a horse or dog.

The Zong affair lit a fuse amongst Quakers and other non-conformists who began to campaign against the slave trade.

The British slave trade reached its height in the latter decades of the 18th century, yet there was at the same time a growing chorus of voices in opposition to it. At the centre of the abolitionist movement were some of the parishioners of Holy Trinity church on Clapham Common who became known as the Clapham Sect. Two of its key members were the MP William Wilberforce, who led the abolitionist campaign in Parliament, and Thomas Clarkson who tirelessly toured the country, turning the campaign into a mass movement. The Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed in London but there was a great deal of opposition to the abolition, particularly from London MPs who represented the financial interests of the City.

In 1788 Sir William Dolben led a group of fellow MPs to visit a slave ship on the Thames, which was being prepared for a voyage. Up to then ships were fitted out to carry the maximum number of slaves, tightly packed below decks. The conditions so horrified Dolben that he steered the Slave Trade Bill through Parliament, which limited the number of slaves that could be carried according to the size of a ship.

In the meantime, the volume of slave-harvested sugar and rum from the West Indies was increasing. The Thames was congested with ships waiting to be unloaded and theft from moored ships was rife, with a great loss to the West India merchants. The Marine Police force was formed, based at Wapping, to protect the ships of the West India Planters and Merchants on the river. It was the first such police force in the country and eventually led to the formation of the Metropolitan Police. The Marine Police force still operates from the same base at Wapping as part of the Met.

To further protect their cargoes, the West India merchants, together with City grandees, planned a new enclosed dock to the east of London, surrounded by high, prison-like walls. The initial plan was for a set of docks at Wapping, but that was opposed by the City of London Corporation who feared the loss of business to the wharves along their stretch of the river. The West India Committee therefore changed course and went into partnership with the City of London Corporation. Together they decided to create docks across the top of the Isle of Docks, exclusively for the West India trade. The West India Docks opened in 1802.

The campaign by the abolitionists continued for several decades. The plantation owners feared the loss of their investments and argued that Britain’s colonies would be laid to waste, so the best the abolitionists could hope for was to end the slave trade, rather than the total abolition of slavery. They hoped that ending the trade would force the planters to treat their slaves more humanely.

With a growing tide of support in the country for the ending of the slave trade, MPs in the Commons gradually came around to the idea. Yet the Lords of the Upper Chamber, led by the Duke of Clarence, the future King William IV, were less easy to persuade and continually voted against any change. Finally, after years of campaigning in Parliament by William Wilberforce, and a growing anti-slavery opinion in the country, the Slavery Act was passed in 1807, which made it illegal to sell African slaves or transport them on British ships.

But it did not abolish slavery itself. That would take another 26 years. In the years following the abolition of the slave trade it gradually became clear that plantation owners were actually working their slaves harder than before the passing of the Act due to the lack of supply and diminishing number of slaves.

William Wilberforce was by then very elderly, so the abolitionist baton in Parliament was passed to Thomas Fullwell Buxton, MP and owner of the Truman’s Brewery in Brick Lane. The Slavery Abolition Act was passed in 1833 that finally abolished the use of slaves in British colonies. To have it passed by Parliament a compromise was reached whereby slaves were to become so-called ‘apprentices’ of their masters for up to six years, and slave owners were paid compensation at the modern equivalent of £16 billion.

Much of the wealth of Liverpool and Bristol was built on the slave trade and, in Liverpool’s case, on the refining of sugar that had been harvested by slaves. But it seems to me that London’s part has largely been forgotten until recently. Between the latter years of the 17th century until the first decade of the 19th century it is estimated that more than 740,000 slaves were transported across the Atlantic from Africa by ships originating in London.

Much of the wealth of the City of London during the 17th to 19th centuries came from slavery in the West Indies and America, either directly, or indirectly as the centre of commerce and finance. A memorial, called ‘the Gilt of Cain’, was unveiled by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in 2008 in the City to commemorate the ending of the British slave trade 200 years earlier.