Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672–1752 by William A. Pettigrew (review)

The late eighteenth-century peak of the British transatlantic slave trade and the political movement leading to its abolition in 1807 have attracted much more scholarship than have its early days in the late 1600s and early 1700s. This may well be because the end of such a morally reprehensible economic institution is an inherently more gratifying story, particularly given how soon its legislated end followed its peak. It surely cannot be that the trade’s origins and growth are any less inherently interesting, as William A. Pettigrew’s brief, accessible, and very interesting first book demonstrates. Pettigrew, a lecturer at the University of Kent, illuminates a crucial political watershed in the early British trade in enslaved African laborers: Parliament’s gradual undermining of the Royal African Company’s (RAC) monopoly over British trade with Africa over the period from 1688 to 1712. By implicating the classically liberal ideology of freedom of trade in the opening and subsequent acceleration of the British slave trade, Freedom’s Debt forces us to reconsider the role of classical liberalism in the trade’s end nearly a century later. Pettigrew’s book moreover advances the current discussions among scholars such as Steve Pincus, Nuala Zahedieh, D’Maris Coffman, Larry Neal, and Adrian Leonard concerning the impact of the Revolution of 1688 on the economic institutions of the British Atlantic World.

Despite the prominence of the RAC in the book’s subtitle, Pettigrew’s real focus is the company’s Nemesis: the political lobby surrounding the so-called “interlopers” or “separate traders.” Numbers of these illicit traders routinely flouted the monopoly provision in the RAC’s royal charter of 1672, growing in boldness after a crucial high court decision in the postrevolutionary atmosphere of 1689 cast serious doubt on the company’s continued ability to enforce its charter privileges. After years of lobbying by the separate traders and their allies, Parliament passed legislation in 1697 opening the African trade to all subjects who would pay a 10 percent duty to the RAC in lieu of its previous monopoly. Continued lobbying by the separate traders ahead of this compromise act’s scheduled 1712 expiration created a legislative deadlock that resulted by default in an open and duty-free African trade.

Chapter 1 offers a basic time line of this progression, after which the remaining three chapters of Part 1 successively discuss “The Interests” that opposed each other in this political confrontation; “The Ideas” that comprised their contrasting visions of the emerging Atlantic economy; and “The Strategies” by which they sought the support of Parliament, the Board of Trade, and public opinion for their preferred economic vision. The extensive lobbying efforts of the RAC, Pettigrew convincingly argues, proved no match for the superior political acumen of the separate traders and their colonial allies. This transatlantic coalition between England’s independent slave transporters and the planters of North America and the Caribbean played a key role in the eventual opening and escalation of Britain’s slave trade; it was not a result imposed by metropolitan institutions upon the colonies. Pettigrew’s research thus makes an important contribution to the current discussions about the nature of British imperial governance in this period.

Though the heart of Freedom’s Debt is in this first part, entitled “Deregulation, 1672-1712,” the second part—“Re-regulation, 1712-1752”—is in its way no less ambitious. Here, Pettigrew links the seldom-told story about the decades around 1700 to the more abundant literature about the peak and conclusion of Britain’s participation in the transatlantic slave trade in the decades around 1800. After a discussion in Chapter 5 (“The Outcomes”) of the RAC’s attempts to remain viable by focusing on...