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THREE The Ideas Challenging the “Tales of . . . Mandevil” The conspicuous emergence of a population of independent slave traders and their wish to associate themselves with certain areas of the country and particular ideas led contemporary observers of the Africa trade debates to develop a stereotype of the independent slave trader.Thomas Southerne’s slavetrading archvillain, Captain Driver, in his 1699 dramatization of Aphra Behn’s novel, Oroonoko, was callous, hardheaded, upwardly mobile, and a stickler for unthinking graft: “There’s nothing done without it, Boys. I have made my Fortune this way.” The better-bred Widow Lackitt railed against the Captain: “You forget your self as fast as you can; but I remember you; I know you for a pitiful paltry Fellow, as you are; an Upstart to Prosperity; one that is but just come acquainted with Cleanliness, and that never saw Five Shillings of your own, without deserving to be hang’d for ’em.” More famous was the eponymous hero of Daniel Defoe’s pioneering 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe, who had embarked on his merchant career as an independent slave trader in the 1680s. Crusoe epitomized the separate-trader profile as a provincial trader from an immigrant family who sought quick profits to better himself socially. He exhibited a new, intense individualism on his desert island that exemplified the rugged, intrepid capitalist determination of the separate trader.1 Society’s stereotyping of the separate traders according to their driving economic and social ambitions reflected the separate traders’ and the Royal African Company’s own attempts to depict themselves within broader ideological categories. Pamphlets and petitions placed the narrow debate between the company and the separate traders in the context of larger issues to grab the attention and support of disinterested parties, legislators, and the public at large. These ideological depictions helped both sides legitimize their interests and were a central part of their respective political campaigns.They reveal 1. Tho[mas] Southerne, Oroonoko: A Tragedy . . . (London, 1699), 13; Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe . . . (1719), ed. J. Donald Crowley (London, 1972), 3, 16. 84 . DEREGULATION, 1672–1712 important features of the mentalities that cultivated and embraced slave-trade expansion in the British Atlantic at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Independent slave traders appeared to be especially sensitive about liberty . Like William Wilkinson, Thomas Phelps, an independent slave trader, embarked in August 1685 on an interloping slave-trading voyage only to be captured, not by the African Company, as Wilkinson and others were, but by Barbary corsairs. The experience of captivity made Phelps acutely appreciative of his personal liberty: Liberty and Freedom are the happiness only valuable by a Reflection on Captivity and Slavery, they who are unacquainted with, and have not notice of the Miseries of the latter, will never put a due Value and consideration upon the former. . . . Here the Government secures every Man in the possession and enjoyment of what Gods blessing and his own industry has allow’d.2 By the Africa trade debates, it is clear that reflection on captivity could derive from the experience of slave trading as well as from the experience of captivity (whether the captors were the African Company or North African rulers). Phelps’s separate-trading antecedents, most of whom had not experienced captivity, developed their view of the world and their appeal to the public with frequent (and, to our eyes, perverse) references to freedom and to liberty and the various ways in which the company inhibited the enjoyment of these rights. The separate traders launched their campaign to develop the slave trade as a crusade for English liberty. The African Company responded by noting that the separate traders’ attachment to liberty did not produce a trade that was suitable for upholding the interests of the British state in Africa and in America, and they later co-opted the separate traders’ rhetoric by citing the company’s freedom to enjoy property and the ways in which monopoly could best uphold national liberty. Although the two parties disagreed about the determinants and ramifications of liberty, they both deployed the syncretic rhetoric of liberty and freedom as a means to compel all observers to rally to their cause. The ideological dispute between separate traders and the company became, as one pamphleteer put it, a “paper counter scuffle” about liberty.3 2. Thomas Phelps, A True Account of the Captivityof Thomas Phelps, at Machaness in Barbaryand of His Strange Escape in Company of Edmund Baxter and...

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