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TWO The Interests “A Well-Governed Army of Veteran Troops” versus “an Undefinable Heteroclite Body” of “Pirates” and “Buccaneers” In January 1690, when the African Company began its parliamentary appeal to obtain statutory support for its monopoly, its directors had every reason to be confident of success. The Hudson’s Bay Company had recently received a statute to support its operation. The African Company had received the endorsement of the new monarch, William III, who had accepted the governorship of the company along with a thousand pounds of African Company stock. William proposed to use the company as part of his military strategy against the French. He charged the company with engaging in combat with French vessels and soldiers within the limits of its charter. The company’s directorate and adventurers were also powerful and wealthy people. Edward Colston, the company’s deputy governor, had made a fortune as an Atlantic trader and commanded great respect in commercial and political circles. Another director, Sir Benjamin Bathurst, who had served as an African Company director since 1677, was a City of London alderman and a prominent financier. Bathurst had also been a director of the East India Company since 1684. Other East India Company directors served the African Company at this time: Sir Thomas Cooke, George Bohun (Bathurst’s nephew), and Sir William Hodges. Sir Peter Colleton, the influential lobbyist for the plantations and a director of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and John Morice, who had vast experience of the Turkey trade as a director of the Levant Company, also lobbied for the African Company in the 1690 parliamentary session. Indeed, during its history, the Royal African Company was to benefit from 105 directors who brought experience from other companies.1 1. See Abigail Leslie Swingen, “The Politics of Labor and the Origins of the British Empire, 1650–1720” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2007), 262. Twenty-seven percent of African Company directors served with other companies, compared to less than 5 percent for the sepa- 46 . DEREGULATION, 1672–1712 The entrenched power of the African Company would continue throughout the ensuing course of the Africa trade debates. During the period 1672– 1752, thirty-eight directors of the company (or 10 percent) occupied positions in the government or court. Only twenty (or 2 percent) of the separate traders, on the other hand, held government offices. In fact, the company boasted sixty-five directors who were also members of Parliament (MPs), almost three times the number for the separate traders (twenty-four).The company also benefited from some heavy-hitting support from merchants, who commanded power with the most important business lobbyist in the land, the Corporation of the City of London. Directors like Sir John Fleet and Sir William Withers brought civic rank to the company’s lobby as each served as lord mayor of London in the 1690s. The company’s directors were far more likely to serve as officials within the City of London’s governing corporation as aldermen, sheriffs, and lords mayor. Compared to less than 1 percent of the separate traders, almost 5 percent of the directors of the African Company enjoyed such offices, including twelve lords mayor. This kind of office holding helped to support the African Company’s claim to act in the service of the state and for the good of the public.2 The African Company’s corporate structure suited the task of parliamentary lobbying. The company was run by a deputy and subgovernor who were chosen from a directorate of major shareholders, the Court of Assistants . Its formal hierarchy of directors, officials, adventurers, and servants provided reliable parliamentary supporters for its cause. This group was large. It amounted to a potential constituency of well over one thousand individuals throughout the period of the Africa trade debates. The company also enjoyed a network of outposts and agents in the provinces, in Exeter and Bristol, and in the colonies of the Caribbean and the American mainland as well as several on the African coast (in addition to Africa House, its London headquarters on Leadenhall Street in the heart of the City of London). From these vantage rate traders.The supplementary biographical information about the separate traders and the Royal African Company directors in this chapter derives from a trawl of the following databases from Gale Digital Collections: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Collection Newspapers; State Papers Online; Eighteenth Century Collections Online; The Making of the Modern World. 2. African Company officials who...

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