Empire: World History - 54. Royal African Company: Slavery Inc

Episode Date: June 6, 2023

The Royal African Company was at the heart of England's involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. From its inception to the abolition of the trade, it was responsible for shipping more enslaved people across the Atlantic than any other organisation. Join William and Anita as they discuss the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade and the company at the centre of it. Sign up to The Knowledge here: www.theknowledge.com/empire/ LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/empire This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/empirepod. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport + Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mparpoduk.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arndan. And me, William, William, I'm going to start with a quote this week. you'll know what it pertains to but I'm just going to leave it just hanging in the air for just a nanosecond

Are you hinting that I might possibly spoil I'm basically begging you Not to give away the ending To shut it I mean the nicest possible We've never been in this situation Elevated literary deferential way that I can muster

Shut it Shut it Okay right I'm going to read this is quite serious Promising start Right, okay But it is quite serious Let me read it first

And then we'll get people Just for a second Let your mind wander And think what this could be about It was the first principle And foundation of all the rest The mainspring, the machine Which set every wheel in motion

Now you've had your nanosecond but this attains to slavery. And its role in the British economy. So just again, just think, put the word slavery in that. So the way in which it drove everything that England was, the first principle, the foundation of all the rest, the main spring of the machine which sets every wheel in motion. This isn't somebody who's writing retrospectively,

who's looking at all the documents and mapping it together with the growth of England. This is a man called Maliki. Posselthwaite, a prominent advocate of the slave trade. He was a lobbyist for the Royal African Company. And this is what he said about the slave trade's role in Britain's economy. And William, he wasn't wrong, was he? He wasn't wrong. And I have had the most fascinating week reading up on the Royal African Country, which I thought that I would know a very bit about in the sense that I spent 20 years writing about the East Indy company. And I presumed that I understood what was

going on in its sister company, many of whose investors were the same as the East India Company and emerging from exactly the same world as Elizabethan and Stuart, England, and the expanding English economy and this urge to sail abroad and make fortunes in whatever way was possible at the time. But I have been astonished at how different the story is to the East Indy Company in one crucial way, in that the East India Company, though it has a royal charter, is the story of ambitious merchants going out and doing their own thing with a fair degree of independence from the English state, later British state. And that's one of the things I found most interesting about the East India Company was the fact that it was sort of privatized

imperialism. It was imperialism, but in a very unfamiliar form of it, big corporate. Well, I mean, it was, it was even referred to as the company. I mean, which tells you, the company, you know. And it really was company. Because, as we all know, in quite a lot of versions, both in India and in England of our history, it has become a British exercise. And the implication is that this is managed by Downing Street, the Crown Parliament. And, you know, the fighting is happening by the army and the Navy. And as we actually know, the extraordinary thing about the East India Company is that none of that's true, that it's actually run by shareholders.

It's got its own army, which remarkably are Indians, mercenaries, fighting for white people, but recruited locally, mainly eventually from Lucknow and Bihar. And the company is not only not the British government, but it's often working hard to undermine the British government and bribing people in Parliament. And it's caught, you know, it's caught 6090, the first case of corporate corruption in the entire history of the country, the world takes place when the governor of the Sydney Company is found passing brown envelopes

full of cash to parliamentarians. What's different about this story that we're going to have today, the Royal Africa Company, is that the governor is not some stovepipe padded Tudor merchant with a nice rough sitting in a guild hall somewhere with his other merchantmates. This is, and it's not going to be an easy thing for this country to explain away. This is a royal crown enterprise. Well, again, just to reinforce that, because again, this blew me away, you know, from your excellent telling of the East India Company, it seemed to be levels and levels and levels of people who did go out for the hell they wanted and often annoyed the people who were above them. So, you know, let us not forget, you know, that people like

Dalhousie would go in and decide how to divvy up spoils and riches. Including the Coenor, yeah. Including the Coenor diamond. And the East India Company would be saying, what? But it's not yours. What the hell are you talking about? To which the government would say, hang on a minute, it's also now not yours. So, you know, there were levels of friction. There were levels of opposition within the East India Company and, as you say, all around private enterprise, that do not exist in what ostensibly here seems to be very clearly a pyramid structure with a point at the top. And before we get into the pointy bits.

Which is itself enormously astonishing. And also sort of weirdly contemporary. Yes. Some of the names may seem familiar. So sound of a little familiar, shall we just say. Many of the names will sound very familiar. But just, I mean, I think it would be worth, William, for those people who haven't, and I know there are at least seven of you out there who haven't listened to all of our podcasts

in order in the way that we met later. It cannot be that there are people out there. I would they? You know who you are. And we know who you are. More importantly, we know who you are. Anyway, look, the thing is. is we have over the last few episodes been talking about slavery that exists elsewhere in the

world. I mean, places like Rome where it was ingrained in the fabric, but, but, but, but, but. We've talked about the Barbary slaves, but, but, but, but we've talked about Ottoman slavery, but, but, but there is a difference that seems pretty clear in those structures, there were means out. If you were a slave, you could get out of being a slave. Some of those ways were entirely distasteful and appalling. Not always. And so we don't want to romanticise it. Not even slightly.

Most slaves who are enslaved probably always remained enslaved, but there was established escape routes in almost all the other systems. So in Rome we talked with Mary Beard about, you know, slaves being freed and the population of Rome itself being made up of enormous proportions of freed slaves. We talked about the Barbary Coast, which was, you know, appalling, appalling treatment of enslaved people who were taken from the British Isles. But there were chances out, slim, small and not for everyone, as William says, that if you converted, you became assimilated and your child was not necessarily a slave. And in the Indian system and in the Ottoman system, you find many of the people

who end up ruling these societies are former slaves. So we had Manicamba rising to the top in the Indian Deccan, in the 16th and 17th and 17th. centuries and the slave kings we talked about in Delhi who were themselves captured slaves who end up ruling great chunks of India. Ditto in the Ottoman system, as we know, you were continually upset every time we talked about the ginnissaries, this harvesting of boys. Little boys being taken away. But they end up, in many cases, as if not the vizier, then the architect of the realm in charge of the Navy, and the entire civil service of the Ottomans is run by former slaves. But in this system, black Africans were nearly always slaves for life, and their children

would be slaves to... And their grandchildren in perpetuity. And those who care. It is an industrial scale that is unprecedented in human history. And also just the way that it's distanced and out of sight is the other thing that made me startled when I thought about it properly this week. first time. And the fact that in Rome, you have, we think, a fifth of the population of Italy in the first century are enslaved. But many of those get freed. They're in domestic system.

And they're obviously in sight so people know that this is there. What's so strange about the whole story of the transatlantic slave trade is it takes place out of sight in another room. The slaves are being taken from West Africa. They're being taken to the Caribbean. And all that arrives back in Britain are the products, tobacco, sugar and cotton. So none of it happens inside. Which maybe explains why there's such silence in Britain for hundreds of years. We talk about Wilberforce and we'll come to Wilberforce and we'll talk about the abolitionists, we'll come to them. But for hundreds of years, there were hardly any voices raised against this practice of taking other human beings, making them inferior and making them.

and making them slaves forever and generations to come slaves forever. And the other thing we were saying is the numbers. We established the most single, most interesting thing in my view, what Nabil said was that his analysis of the figures, he's been for 20 years looking through all the figures for the Barbary slave trade and the amount of northern Europeans captured and taken to places like Sally and Algiers and so on. and contrary to some earlier historians, inflated figures, having gone through everything for 20 years, Nabil puts the figures in the tens of thousands, that there are, you know, 4,000 in Sally, 5,000 in Algiers and so on.

The numbers for the transatlantic slave trade are on a wholly different industrial scale. 12 million black Africans are transported across the Middle Passage, of whom only 10 make it to the Caribbean. In other words, die on route. Now, let's go back to the origin story of all of this, because, you know, plantation slavery began before Britain. I mean, it's been happening since the late 15th century. It predates the British. That is very clear. Very early.

That again was something I hadn't taken in. You have the first black Africans being taken to work on sugar plantations in Cape Verde and the Island of Madeira in the 1480s, which is what you know, a plantagenet period. That is Tudor England. Tudor Times, the textbook that I studied when I was doing history at school. So we're talking about the time of Edward the 7th, Richard the 3rd, Henry the 7th, Richard the Duke of Gloucester, all of that stuff. The Tudor beams and the open windows and the sewage being thrown out into the streets, all the stuff that we learn at school. And at that point, you have the Portuguese who, as we know, have pioneered the sea routes down the coast of Africa Vasco da Gama going to Kerala and all that sort of stuff. And they have begun taking Africans who have been enslaved and they work them on islands in the Atlantic,

not yet the Caribbean. They take them to Cape Verdi, which is in the middle of the Atlantic and Madeira. When do the British enter the fray, William? So the British are late comers in this. The next on the route are the Spanish. And they're the first to take enslaved Africans to the New World in the Caribbean. and that's at the start of the 16th century still though with what we kind of think of as the Middle Ages really

when you know wool churches are being built and Suffolk and all that sort of stuff and this is a lot of it on the say-so of the Pope who's just basically carving up bits of the world and saying this belongs to you Spain this belongs to you the Portuguese to which the King of France delightfully responds I'd like to see the codicil in Adam's will

he says you can carve up the world in this way and what about us governor And the Caribbean at that point is settled by fierce Caribab islanders. And the Caribs never agree to be enslaved and work, which is why continually from this point, you find more and more people bringing black Africans who are malaria hardened, who don't die at the minute they arrive in the Caribbean because genetically living on the West Coast of Africa, they have resistance to the malarial mosquito. and this genetic improvement, if you like, this sort of USP results partly in the horror that follows. It's an interesting thing. I mean, you're right. There's a hardiness.

So there's a superiority in physicality. And yet there's an inferiority of race. And that starts creeping in even at this point. In the eyes of the enslavers. In the enslavers. So the Portuguese, you know, turn this into a bit more of a refined art. So we've got numbers of slaves, transported priests. 1600s and you know compared to what we're about to talk about with the middle passage it's quite

low but we're talking still quite high a few hundred thousand it's you know we're talking hundreds of thousands versus millions but so they sort of took the baton and then the baton passes to the english and this is i don't know if you saw that wonderful a david olasoga civilizations program and this is this period of history which again is completely new to me when the Portuguese are establishing very intimate contact with West Africa in the early 16th century. And you have Portuguese influence on all those ivories. You have the Africans making art for the Portuguese court. And then you have this picture of Lisbon, which David showed on his program,

which is this extraordinary multi-ethnic city already by the 16th century, with large numbers of black people on horseback as knights, which again is not what you necessarily assume. So the first ever English slave trading expedition was Sir John Hawkins, and that was 1562. Tell us about him. So he took slaves, and I think it's about 300 of them from the west coast of Africa, and he takes them to the Caribbean, where he sells them to the Spanish at significant profit. Because at this point, there aren't English colonies yet in the Caribbean.

That follows later. And, of course, the problem for the English at this point is that there are Johnny come lately in all this. The Spanish and the Portuguese have been in the new world for a century by this stage, not quite a century, but 1562. They've been there for 70 years. And there is an established demarcation of land, the Portuguese have got Brazil, the Spanish have got everything else. And there is very strong Portuguese and Spanish control also of the West African ports. So the English are trying to poke their noses into this, often with very, with very, disastrous results. You have lots of English ships going down, a lot of death on the coast,

and a lot of inexperienced English would be slavers, making a very cack-handed attempt to break into what is at this stage a Spanish and Portuguese game. Hawkins wasn't cack-handed about it. He was successful, and sugar was his business. So he starts making great inroads to the extent where he becomes a very, very wealthy man. And when you, I mean, if you're not from Great Britain, you may not know about. this, but we have a system of coats of arms. So we have these heraldic shields with images on them that represent nobility. And you can be sort of newly ennobled.

And you go along to the College of the Coat of Arms and you often have a chat and say, look, this is what I would like on my coat of arms. What John Hawkins asked for on his coat of arms, among the other bits and bulbs, was a picture of an enslaved male in that coat of arms because that, It was upon that back that his nobility and his fortune were built. And I find even that sort of pictorally is so strong. Yeah. Why would you choose how, what's going on in his mind?

So normally it's the unicorns or lions or, you know, the lion rampant. So it means that if a lion is standing sort of head on to you, it's not. But if it's on its hind legs and it's doing that pawing of the sky, it is rampant. So, yes. I saw a rampant talbot yesterday. I'm speaking to you from Somerset. I've left in the... And you've just put a spoonful of cornflakes in your face.

Do you hear it? I can't. Do carry on. Very good posh granola. Oh, right. Okay. Carry on. No, sorry.

We'll try and get rid of the oats. Yes. And I'm wandering around Somerset yesterday, the very beautiful shield in the village I'm staying in, of a Talbot, which is basically a doggy. And a doggy rampant. A doggy rampant. Yeah, yeah. So, anyway, look, so I mean, this is how front-facing it was, that he just had an enslaved black young man on his.

But actually, even though he did really well, William, I mean, at what point do they start doing well? What starts as this, you know, the business of slavery start taking hold? Well, the key is what you mentioned, sugar. And today, you know, you just go to the supermarket and you buy it off a shelf and you don't think about it at all. but sugar is the key to a lot of what happens. And there's this wonderful book, if anyone wants to read more called Sweetness and Power, which is one of the very first books to really investigate the economic basis for the slave trade, written in the 60s. And in medieval Europe, of course, the only source of or the main source of sugar was honey.

And if you wanted a bit of sweetness in your life, you had to keep bees. And then you get sugar cane coming initially from India, and it makes it as far with the Red Sea trade to Cairo. And you have merchants in 15th, 16th century Egypt planting sugar cane in the Nile Delta. And that becomes a big item of trade with Venice. And so you begin to get this taste for sugar arriving in Europe just before this in the 15th and 16th centuries. And this replaces currents?

Or because we talked about currents in previous, you know, in the Ottoman series. This is the peak of the current, the current trait. Because currents are part of the same sort of story. People like currents for their sweetness. But they also like it because the tudas bizarrely liked fruit in their stews. Right. Okay. And one of the interesting points, there's a lovely book by a guy called David Burton called the Rajat Table.

And he makes the point that when the British arrive in Surat for the first time, the East India Company, there's very little difference between the stews being cooked in India and the stews being cooked in Britain. Because both of them are full of four of the first time. fruit and the chili hasn't arrived yet in India. Oh, right. What is that a state of affairs? The chili comes, as we know, from Latin America. But anyway, the sugar, taste for sugar, the taste for sweetness suddenly hits Europe in

the 16th century. And initially it's coming from Cairo and Egypt. But people realize they can start their own sugar plantations. And this is the beginning of all this, because one of the first products of the transatlantic slave trade, before tobacco really gets going and before cotton really gets going is sugar and it's the taste for sweetness and of course this then rapidly

increases when the British get hold of tea. The real acceleration sort of is at the turn of the 17th century and this is when the British start having better ships and better cannon and better luck. Which again we dealt with a bit in the Nebile Matar episode under Cromwell you get this incredible beginning of British sheep-ar.

Yes and that's when they start taking controls of vast parts of the Sugar Kingdom, if you like, you know, the Caribbean. And they start developing their own plantations. Now, it's clear that some British colonies, and we're talking about the American South and the Caribbean, were ripe for mass-producing sugar. In the climatically, it's suited. Climatically, and you've got cheap labour possibilities of people who are already living there, and then the idea that actually that's not enough, labour. So if you have mass production, you need more people. And more people than exist in those lands.

already, and that is where the eyes start gazing towards Africa. Well, what's interesting? And I, again, didn't know this until reading this week about the beginning of the Royal Africa Company. And initially, the British do not turn to Black African slaves. They turn to white workers. And there's this whole world of indentured servants, people called redemptioners, who are people who pay for their voyage to new lives in the new world through work. So it's like a form of, of white indentured labor. You get the system whereby poor whites offer themselves to shippers to form new lives

in the new world or the Caribbean. And they effectively indentured themselves. And they offer themselves to the shipping company. So do they go through their middle passage the same way? I mean, what are the conditions that they're taken across in? Not much better. I mean, I don't think they're manacled, but they've only got, is it, 5.5 feet by 16 inches for each birth. So it's more, I think it's more like, think of those films of the poor Irish at the potato famine going over to the New World.

It's that sort of thing, being with sickening sea voyages going on for weeks and terrible seas and everyone being sick in the hold and no air getting in. But it's not as bad as the slave passage where everyone is manacled and can't leave their birth for whatever it is three months. Also, I'm guessing with redemptioners, you know, the white workers who are being taken across in appalling situations and who are, you know, de facto. protein slaves is they don't have the immunity to the diseases that exist in the new world. They don't have that on it. Right. So there must be a lot of sickness. There must be a lot of death among those workers.

And contractually, they are different. They're not slaves. They are workers. And their loss of liberty is not for life. They can, after they've finished their period of redemption, they've done their work, they're freed. So it becomes understood by the shippers and the plantation. owner is that this is not the most efficient form of labour for these new plantations. And there was something else that I found really shocking. And then it's, again, it's sort of

boring old economics comes into this at every turn. So somebody had done a reckoning that the cost of buying a white servant in one of these indentured servants for 10 years, someone has actually worked out the equation. It's the same as buying a slave for life. And so, you know, that mathematics is also at play in the background. And so you have a certain pivoting in mindset that goes on. It's all right. These people are available, but they die really quickly and they're really expensive. And we have to let them go after 10 years.

We can do better than this. And so at this point, the shippers and the plantation owners begin to do the math and they realize that, A, these guys liberate themselves at the end of their tenure, B, their children are free anyway. And so you don't have a self-perpetuating workforce that these guys go off after a while. and see that they are not immune to the diseases, that they fall victim to tropical diseases very quickly and die. And for the plantation owners, this is bad economic. So at this point, they begin to look at the Portuguese and the Spanish model again,

and they keep their eyes fixed firmly on West Africa. So join us after the break where Arge's also turns on West Africa, and we find out what they do to fill this gap in their labour market. Welcome back. So before the break, we were talking about, you know, some of the really startling things that we've learned about this. You know, the British had the plantations, but first they tried to staff the plantations, either with people who were native to those soils. Carribs, yeah. Carribs. Or with white indentured labourers who they could own for 10 years and then would have to set free because you worked through your debt. And convicts on occasions, too. You do get convicts being put across. There are some interesting accounts of people being just rounded up and kidnapped as well from Britain and then loaded onto these ships.

You know, almost like sort of press-ganging into this kind of servitude. Anyway, but that's not good enough. So the gaze turns towards Africa. We're talking now towards the end of the 17th century. And this is seen as an inexhaustible supply of labour. Britain's already involved in this in a small way, but they need more labourers. So at this point, they want to up it. So, Willie, at the time, when they suddenly change their focus and they say, right, we're going to actually collect in great numbers black slaves to work these plantations.

Was there any thought of the morality? Was there any justification offered? Was there any kind of argument going on in Parliament or in literature or anywhere else about the rights and wrongs of doing this? This is the extraordinary thing reading it today from the 21st century is that no one raises this at all. There is literally no discussion on the morality of it. And there's all sorts of discussion. It's a controversial thing. And we're coming now to the creation of the Royal Africa Company.

And when that happens, there is massive debates in Parliament. But it's not about the morality of slavery. It's about how to do it better. How to do it better and more efficiently and whether it can be a monopoly or not. And that goes backwards and forwards for 100 years. But I've never come across in all my reading of this, any moral questioning at this stage of the basic premise. So can it be as banal as this?

Can someone say something as banal as this? Mass enslavement was forced because people liked sugar in their tea. You actually can say, you can say this is the price of a cup of tea, 12 million African lives into servitude and human trafficking because we like sweetness.

So now these sort of big, again, it's sort of corporates if you like come in or these big plantations come in and they squeeze out all the small holdings, are small farms that exist in Barbados. I think there's some really interesting figures we can put on this. Barbados in 1645 had just over 11,000 small white farmers and five and a half thousand black slaves.

By 1667, there were 745 large plantations and 82,000 black slaves. So you can see the way it's going. The small farmers get squeezed out. Yeah, they're completely squeezed out, but the way in which this is sort of, it's like the behemoths turn up. And Barbados is the first British slave plantation, isn't it? Jamaica's still in the hands of the Spanish at this point. And this is the laboratory, if you like, for the British end of the transatlantic slave trade.

They've seen what the Spanish and the Portuguese are up to and they think they can make the same sort of money. Because this is an enormously profitable innovation because you're paying basically no labor costs. You're manufacturing, mass producing, very high value products such as cotton, tobacco and sugar, and you're shipping it to Europe with very, very low costs. And so the mercantile Brits get onto this very quickly, or at this point the English, because the Scots are not part of this story yet, that they will become so. And in fact, there are all sorts of Scots trying to get their edge into it. I think they're based in, is it in Mauritius or Madagascar, there's a Scottish pirate colony

that does raiding of slave ships and then reselling. But they're on the margins at this point. And one of the reasons for the active union in 1707 is that the Scots realized that they're missing out on the money which is being made by their English contemporaries. I mean, let's not jump forward too much. So, Sue, I mean, you sort of touched on this before, is that, you know, the reason the English were able to push into these areas

and elbow out the Portuguese and the Spanish is because they had better ships. The reason they had better ships is because, Charles I decided he wanted better ships. He just, he was sick of not having a rubbish fleet. But the way in which he financed that major program of shipbuilding, the high taxation, it really riled his people. I mean, to the point where it leads to, or contributes certainly, you can say, the outbreak

of the English Civil War. And yet, Oliver Cromwell then takes it forward. And the guy who really soups up the Royal Navy and turns it into the most powerful Navy in the world is Oliver Cromwell, ironically. Yeah. And this is the point where remember Nabil on his episode was talking about the beginning of these English fleets bombarding Algiers with cannon. Oh yes, he talked about it just as bombing it to dust.

And this is under Cromwell that you get this for the first time. And then at the same time you also get the first, we forget this, this extraordinary story of the English colony in Tangiers, which Samuel Peebs is part of. And this comes to the English crombole. when Charles II marries Catherine of Brighanza in 1662 and it's part of the same diary that the English get Bombay

Wow Or as it's called in the treaty Bombay And there's a big discussion In the English court where they get this Because the annex with the maps Has not arrived in London And there's long discussion

Where Bombay is And they assume it must be somewhere in Brazil Oh really? I don't even know where it is Oh, that's a gorgeous fact. Most of us register at John Lewis, but he's a slightly better wedding gifts. Okay. So you've got the English fleet expanding into the Mediterranean and English colony in Tangiers. And at the same time that this is going on, you have this major shipbuilding,

which allows the Royal Navy to dominate the Caribbean for the first time. And this is all the background to pirates of the Caribbean. This is all that sort of stuff. Yes, yes. So, I mean, Charles II, so is a. a key to a lot of this, apart from his marriage to Catherine of Braganza, he also has this notion, which it takes a long time for England to disabuse itself of, that actually everything, everything in his realm should be done through monopoly. So, you know, when we talk about monopoly,

we mean one company exclusive rights to everything. That's how he thinks the world should work. And it's the kind of theory, I suppose, which underpins the East India company. We've talked about that as well, haven't we, when you? So this is a central issue. If you read any books, the East India Company monopoly is challenged almost from the moment it's given. It's there in the initial grant of 1600. And from that moment, you get shipbuilders and ship owners and merchants who are excluded, who are not part of the East India Company, who want in, because there's vast amounts of money they see to be made in the India trade. And you have at various points. The Scots found their own version. You have another renegade group of English ship owners found a second East India

Company and then they have different sides on the Civil War. And it goes back because and forwards. But in the end, the monopoly of the East Indy Company basically lasts until the 1830s. And it's only in the 1830s, finally, that the right to exclusively trade with India is broken. But this is the issue which then comes up. You're quite right. So the Royal Africa Company is founded on the same principle, but are there the same voices at the time saying, hang on a minute. I'm not in your monopoly. You're not buying my timber or my boats or my sailors or, you know, where's my bit of the sweetness here? Exactly that.

And I think it's even more of part of the story of the Royal Africa Company that is about the East Indy Company because the entire politics of the Royal Africa Company is dominated. Certainly its appearance in Parliament is dominated by this question of monopoly? Is it right that one company should have their hands on the money pot and everyone else be kept out? But I mean, they're arguing away, but whatever anyone says, Charles is going to do what Charles is going to. King Charles will do what he wants. And the monopoly is given to the company of Royal Adventurers, first of all, isn't it, William, trading to Africa. And this date is important. 1660 is the date. No, 1660 is the year of the restoration. The Republic is over.

The Commonwealth is over. Cromwell is dead. Charles II is back. And certainly some historians have argued that this. idea of the Royal Africa Company is the Stewart's Royal Drive to finance the restoration. How are they going to pay their bills? And this is now, you know, the East India Company is founded in 1600. This is now 1660, 60 years later. The whole landscape has changed. There are innumerable joint stock companies. And this is a very jolly come lately attempt to piggyback on the success

of the East India Company and the other big trading companies. And, And what is crucially different from all the others is that the Crown keeps the lion's share of it. They've seen in previous generations the Crown giving out a charter, getting a sum of money for the charter. Getting potatoes and tobacco at Christmas. That's what. But they see their subjects making vast amounts of money, but they don't. The difference with the Royal Africa Company, and this is where it's, you know, it's a complicated story. for the present is that the crown is right out the heart of it.

So this is the pointy bit of the pyramid, you know, that they sit on top. They're the ones in charge. I mean, name names. Who's running the day to day? You'd be surprised to hear it's the Duke of York. The Duke of York. The Duke of York, no less. And the Duke of York in this case is not somebody called Andrew.

It is somebody called James. And it's the future James II. Now, this guy is the guy who is not only promotes the idea of the Royal Africa company. He also becomes its manager. He's a CEO. And its largest shareholder. I mean, he is basically Logan Roy. He's Logan Roy.

And he stitches it up as Logan Roy does. And it is like succession with all his aristocratic friends and with Prince Rupert. So you get this whole bunch of people who basically stuck their neck out for the stewards during the Commonwealth. And they're rewarded by getting their hands on the pot of the Royal African Company. But it's not the Royal Africa Company yet. Just as in, you know, you're sort of a Marvel franchise, you have origin stories, the origin story, the Royal Africa Company we've just given you, which is the company of Royal Adventurers. But then it goes through a transmutation, three years after creation. It becomes the Company of Royal Adventurers. And then in 1672, it gets reborn, reformed again as the Royal African Company. Do the people at the pinnacle, the Duke of York and all his mates, do they remain the ones at the top of this pyramid all the way through?

Yes. And this is quite normal in the sense for these young joint stock companies. If you look at the history of any of these big companies, whether it's the Hudson Bay Company or the East India Company, they often go through these sort of periods of issuing new shares or renaming themselves or refinancing themselves. It's in the nature of corporate histories that things go up and down, things fold. But the seed planted in 1660 with the foundation of the Royal Africa Company's ancestor company is the thing that, creates the British end of the slave trade. There's absolutely no way around that. And the other thing, though, to perhaps say straight up,

is that initially, like for the first three years, and the original idea is not so much slaves as gold. And they know there's gold mines in the Gold Coast. And they're searching for gold initially. Now, what's interesting is that the Royal Africa Company mince its own coins for the crown, and they're called, of course, Gilles, named after guinea.

So that's where the guinea is called the guinea because it comes from West African gold. I am this many days old when I learned that. I didn't know that before researching this. Gosh. Oh, I love that. Isn't that good? Yeah. So that's what they're after.

First of all, that after African gold, it's, you know, this dream that somehow in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in terms of change, uh, the steward finances. just as the Bolivian minds had changed that of the Spanish. But very quickly, they realized that it's not actually on the scale that they're hoping. And within three years, in the second incarnation of the company, it is focused far more on human trafficking, on slavery. There is so much to talk about on this subject that I think we're going to be going to two episodes this week. And we'll continue on Thursdays because we haven't even got halfway through this story today. So see you again two days later on Thursday. Join us then. That's it from me, Anita Arnan.

And me, William Durunpool.