Empire: World History - 55. The Fall of the Royal African Company

Episode Date: June 8, 2023

The Royal African Company has a monopoly on the trading of slaves, given directly by the Stuarts. But the Glorious Revolution sweeps in and they are deposed. How will The Company fare? And, more importantly, how will this affect the transatlantic slave trade? Listen to William and Anita to find out. 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 podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. And welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durimple. Why are you leaning in? How many times, Darth Vader? I just had a very nice idea. A strong cup of coffee, whizzing and ready to go on this fascinating, but incredibly grim subject

that we've got to talk about. It is incredibly grim. We left you at the end of the last episode with the creation, the birth story of the Royal African Company. And William, the dates we were sort of talking about, the foundation 1672 of what was the final iteration of the Royal Africa Company, just give us an idea of what they were doing and what period of time? Because I don't think we have dates and numbers really attached to this just yet. So they are founded initially to look for gold. And this idea that there's, you know, King Solomon's minds, that that sort of idea that in the centre of Africa you've got this amazing source of gold.

But that proves to be an illusion. And they realise that within about three years, they realize that they're not going to find the gold that they were after all, the quantity of gold there. Although, as we discussed at the end of the last programme, they do get some gold and they use it to mint a new coin for Charles II called after West Africa the Guinea, which is a gold coin, which we were all very pleased to discover last time. But the story gets brimmer from that point because they rapidly realize the only way they can balance their books is by human trafficking, that they can begin to take enslaved people from. West African ports, ship them to the Caribbean, and the Royal Africa Company is the institution that is more responsible than any other for the transshipment of human beings. And around 150,000 people are transported from the right Africa Company's foundations in 1672 to the early 1720s when its monopoly disintegrates. Right. I mean, I mean, that's just a horrific

and awful badge of honour to wear. I mean, just to remind everyone, that's 150,000 men, women and children, human beings, human individuals ripped from their lands and taken to work often to the death in places far away where they don't know anybody, they don't know the language, they are treated entirely harshly. It becomes central. How quickly actually does it become central, I should say, to the British exchequer. Well, this is exactly the same period, the 1780s, that the East India company is beginning to really make money in India. And it does this through three different ways. It's making money through conquering land and getting the rent for that land. It makes it by successful trading of wonderful India products such as silks and cottons, which is always its initial reason for going. there. And thirdly, from the 1780s, it realizes it can grow opium and become a big narco operator. So exactly the same time, the Royal Africa company is really industrializing the business of human trafficking from West Africa to the Caribbean, the East India company is becoming a narco operator in the East

and those two sources together, often with the same families and same investors, straddling the two institutions are the thing that propels the British economy from the margins of Europe to the foremost economy by the end of the 18th century. Just to give you an idea of being the foremost economy, so just, and the idea of how quickly this happened, the Royal African company manages to steal so much market share from all of its opponents from the Dutch and the French. I hate reducing this to market share when it's human beings, but there's no other way around it. There's no other way around it to understand it. So if you look at those dates that William sort of touched on, 1673,

a year after the foundation of the Royal African Company. And let's not forget, this is with royalty sitting at the very pinnacle of it, running it as the Logan Roy's, we put it in the last episode of this podcast. The English have a 33% share of the market. By 1683, that rises to 74% of global trade belongs to England. And again, just to emphasize the point we made at the end, this is a royal enterprise in a way that East India Company is not. And the company of Royal Adventurers Charter states in its license that it is, quote,

a prerogative of the crown and therefore is free to be placed where his majesty shall be pleased without giving any just cause a complaint to any other that share not in it. The company was sending just to give you an idea of just how busy they were, about an average of 23 voyages a year. And they almost exclusively came out of London. So London sort of gets built up into the centre of the universe. And this is something we'll we'll return to later on in the program, but the fact that it's London, the fact that it's not Bristol or Liverpool or any of the other ports that will later take the place as the major slaving ports in Great Britain is the thing that is most discussed about. And it's not the morality of slaving. It's not the suffering of the human beings. None of this gets voiced in Parliament at this period. What gets discussed is whether it should be London or it should be Bristol and also the fact that it's a monopoly. And so you get from the beginning, the crown giving such powers to the Royal African Company that they can actually lock up and enslave rival operators who tried to break the monopoly.

And the great book on the Royal African Company called Freedom's Debt by William Petigrew is very clever. It opens with a description of slaves in a West African slave barracks. And you learn on page two that these are actually Englishmen who've been enslaved by the by the Royal Africa Company and had all their goods taken because they were interlopers trying to break the monopoly. Also, let's just, because Pettigree's book, William Pettigree's book is excellent, but he puts flesh on some really miserable bones. But some of the names, we talked about the Duke of York, future King James II who's sitting at the top of this pyramid. But it's all his mates, as you pointed out, and one of those names is very familiar here in England now, or in Great Britain now, and that's Edward Colston.

So he's one of these people who benefits enormously. who ended up in Bristol Harbour, we should say. So, yes, so there's a statue was of Edward Colston, who, you know, a lot of Bristol has grown up around his later in life philanthropy. So Colston Hall was where you would go and see concerts and comedy and this statue right in the heart of things, which was pulled over and, as Williams says, thrown into the harbor. But also 65 MPs. So, you know, there isn't going to be a political will ever to challenge any of this, is there?

And any of you that know your Civil War history, all the names of, of the Stuart side on the Civil War and the restoration. Buckingham, Villers, Sir William Coventry, William Craven, Earl of Craven, or Prince Rupert, most of all. Prince Rupert is a major shareholder. Tell us about Prince Rupert. So Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the Duke of Cumberland, first comes to prominence as the Royalist Cavary Commander in the Civil War.

And like all his mates, he is rewarded for his success at the Restoration, when the Commonwealth has ended and Charles II comes back in triumph by being given a great chunk of the Royal African company as his money generator. I mean the thing though

is that they are running this a band of brothers or a group of mates who are running this but they're running it as a monopoly and it's something that Adam Smith observes in his time

that monopolies are the most inefficient way of doing business. Yes and this interested me because when you look at the history of the East India Company, which is a ruthless libertarian merchant affair, which while it has a royal charter is completely separate from the Crown and gets on and does its own thing ruthlessly without any interference from the Crown, what you find is that it succeeds over the French because the company desand is this Versailles vehicle. And the company design is given to all these

sort of hopeless Phops in Versailles to go and make some money. And one after another, they go out to India and they failed to show the same commercial acumen as the real merchants of the East India Company. What's interesting is that the Royal Africa Company is like that. It's an inefficient royal monopoly given to a bunch of aristocratic foxes. Because aristocratic fops aren't the best at business or building ships or planning or logistics, are they really? And it's renowned as being incredibly inefficient. And one of the complaints at this time, again, the complaints we're expected to hear in Parliament is how can they get away with this monstrous? How can you treat human beings like this, but that's not it. That's never it.

That's not it. What they're saying is that you have massive complaints from the plantation interests represented in Parliament, that they're not getting enough of the labour because the Royal Africa Company is so inefficient, it's not transporting enough slaves for the demand. One of the thing that becomes clear is it's cheaper if you're a plantation owner to just keep moving your land and opening up new land using slave labour than it is to fertilise and maintain existing land. So if you're growing a cash crop over and over again, say it's cotton or say it's sugar, it's depleting the soil very quickly. And rather than paying for fertilizer and rather than organizing careful crop rotation or all the things that farmers would normally do,

they just open up a new stretch of land, clear jungle using the slave labor, and move on. And they haven't got enough slaves to do that. So the Royal Africa Company is accused. of being grossly inefficient and not supplying the labour that the plantation economy needs. I'm not that they're listing very much because, I mean, you know, they're getting rich and rich enough. So also I just, you know, in the last episode of Empire, we talked about a coat of arms for Hawkins, who was, you know, the first man in the field, if you like. But I was just looking at the coat of arms. Have you ever seen the coat of arms of the Royal African Company? It's got an elephant. Yes, it does. It has an elephant at its heart, which has a castle on

its back. It has a big visor from a coat of armour sitting atop that but at each side of it is a black man naked apart from something about the waist holding an arrow. In a feathered headdress sort of servile and standing at the side.

So you know this was a thing that was institutionalised by monarchy which had heraldry which had all the trappings of respectability and not one voice raised against it. And most awful for our sensibilities today, the words D-O-Y are branded on the chess of slaves for Duke of York. I find that just something. And then also RAC, which doesn't stand for the automobile company, but the Royal African Company.

Look, okay, can we, William, can you please explain to us? Because this is a fascinating part of the growth of this awful, terrible, hideous thing, this monopoly. that is the start of what is going to burgeon into the largest slave trade known to man. But the triangular trade, this is very much central to the growth of this. Tell us what the triangular trade is all about. So how do you finance this? How do you actually operate this business? And so what you do is that you take goods from Britain to the West African coast

and you barter it for slaves. There's a whole lot of sort of gigores and things that you actually have companies founded to manufacture, so beads, various forms of decorative ironwork and so on. And this is all shipped over and bartered for human beings on the West African coast. At that point, slaves are put into slaving vessels with hideous conditions, the famous ghastly conditions of the Middle Passage, where you have five-foot, long by is it 16 inches wide, they're basically kind of little pigeon holes that human beings are slotted into and made to stay in

for the whole length of the Atlantic crossing. And they then sail with those to the Caribbean. There, they, the ship owners, barter the human beings for the products of the plantations, such as sugar and cotton and tobacco. And then they are shipped to Britain to be processed in the new factories that are being founded in Britain

to make refined sugar, tobacco and milled cotton in the cotton mills of the north. Can I say, I mean, we are not skipping across the horror of what it is to be in that middle passage. We're going to have further episodes of empire where we're going to talk about this in great detail. One of the first accounts of what it is like to be a human being trafficked in such an inhumane way, comes from a man called Ologue Equehano. We are going to come back to that. There are other narratives that exist as a lovely book called The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho by Patterson Joseph,

which also sort of spills out the beginning of an extraordinary life of a black man here in England. I've been reading this wonderful book by James Wolvin, the trader, the owner and the slave. Have you looked at that wonderful? Not yet, not yet, but I certainly will. But also, you know, the other part of this, And we will come to this later on as well. So we're not skipping over these things.

So, you know, this is only possible with the complicity of rulers from the West African coast. So you will, you know, you will hear later on about, you know, the Duhomi, the Kings of Dahomi, who are making it into, you know, their center for prosperity to round up human beings from rival tribes. In their hundreds of thousands, which then ends up being sort of millions of people who are then shipped across in these voracious gaping mares of holds of ships which swallow up all this humanity. One of the nice things about a series of podcasts such as this is that you have got the time to do all these things. And we're trying to take in in this series all the what aboutry that you get when slavery is talked about. So we've looked very closely at the Barbary slave trade

and other kinds of slave trade. And it's very important to us to explain why this is different, different in scale and different in type. And we're going to be looking at this other feature too, which is also another part of the Whataboutary? What about the West African Kings that were actually selling these people to the... So we're coming to that. So don't get annoyed on Twitter. We're not missing it.

But we're very much looking at the English interest or the British interest in this. And I have to say, you know, the Caribbean and the kind of sugar trade that William has talked about the triangular trade that he just described so very well. becomes so central to English prosperity. There's an economist. I know you don't like hearing from economists, but they're interesting on this. So Josiah Child.

Well, he's one of my East India Companymen, and Child is the guy that declares war on Naranzib. Okay. So he sends a fleet to India and tries to take on the moguls, and the moguls knock them into fetters in about a week flat. So he's a familiar figure. I was almost certain you were going to say he was related. But, okay.

to someone someone you've written about but so Sir Josiah Child who is talking about this in the 17th century says every Englishman in the Caribbean with 10 slaves who works for him

could make employment for four men back in England so that's just just take that in that's how central to the mechanics of English industry this is slavery is

and again I think as with the East Indy company you've got to realise that behind all this, these ships sailing, these plantations, the men in boardrooms, the, the trade on the key sides and so on, you have the share price, which is like the beating heart of the company, which goes up and down with all the politics going on, the debates in Parliament, just like any company does today, just like Elon Musk tweets something and his share price

in Twitter or any of his other companies goes up and down. The same is true at this point. And this is a commercial organization. And while we're talking, you know, in a sense, one of the great outrages of human history, one of the great human rights scandals of the entire history of mankind, at this behind all this, you've got the share price beeping away, going up and down and producing the dividends and the profits, which is financing the expansion of Britain and the founding of whole new cities, Manchester, Liverpool, and we'll come to that later. Tell me this. How do they enforce their monopoly? Because, you know, to have a monopoly, to declare a monopoly, that's one thing. But to enforce it and to make sure that pirates and privateers aren't sort of nipping away on the edges, that's another thing entirely. So this is very much that world of pirates of the Caribbean, where you've got, you know, government garrisons sitting in the headquarters or the capital of an island, be it Jamaica or Barbados, enforcing government rules. And then you've got free agents in their little ship. possibly with a jolly roger flying from their mast or not,

trying to break the monopoly and make money on the edges of it. And this is the Admiralty Court. I mean, the Pirates of the Caribbean thing that you're alluding to, is, you know, you have these Admiralty courts which sit on these sort of vast outreaches. Which are like martial law? Yeah. There's no jury. There's no judge.

There's not even any process. Because if they say, hey, William of Dalrymple, you are Knicking Sugar that actually rightfully should be coming through the Royal African Company, they'll hang you. That's as simple as that, right? So this is exactly. And you actually have these cases of these rival slavers turning up at a port. Behind them suddenly on the horizon comes a Royal Navy frigate,

which is specifically there in order to catch them. And they take these people, they put them in chains, they put them in the slave dungeons, and they either transship them to the Caribbean, and they take all their goods. So the ship is forfeit, the whatever gold or whatever trading goods is inside it is forfeit and the Royal Africa

company sees it and this is actually the beginning of the undoing of the company or certainly that we're propelling it into the limelight in England because the survivors of this who make it back to England then go to Parliament complain to their MP write letters saying this is not how you treat an Englishman it's fine to do this they say to the slaves but it's not fine to do it to us to an Englishman, yeah. And so there's one particular case where there's a ship captain who committed suicide once he got arrested and shoved in the dark tank, Cape Coast Castle on the coast of Ghana, transshipment to the Caribbean plantation. This guy who was a slaver turned slave, he hangs himself in his cell. His brother, who survives this ordeal, goes to England and he

raises Parliament. And this is what begins to chip away at the Royal Africa Company pretty quickly. not because they're seen to be creating inhuman war crimes against captured Africans, but because they're misbehaving with rival slavers. Yeah, I mean, also, it's really worth having a look at some of the literature we thought we understood because I've been taking another look at Robinson Crusoe. Now, Robinson Crusoe, for most people, is the, you know, the Daniel Defoe epic of, you know, the first novel, some say, in the English language. But where a man is shipwrecked on an island and he shows great fortitude,

And at the time it was lauded as, you know, the thing, the real stuff of real English, you know, is that you cope and you manage. And the thing was, he was a slaver. And it's in the book. It's in the early iterations. I think some of the later revisions of it. It somehow manages to escape the Hollywood versions. Doesn't it? But, you know, the whole thing is that he has, he's a slaver who is on a slaving mission gets shipwrecked.

And when he returns after all these years, his company has been operating quite happily, continuing to, you know, take slaves to, his plantations and make him lots of money. So he comes back a wealthy man because his plantations have done well. So I'm just saying this is everywhere and everything. And when you read the debates in Parliament, to us, they're just jaw-dropping because what they're arguing about is freedom. But they're not talking about the freedom of the slaves who've been enslaved, transported, and set to work at an early death in the Caribbean. They're talking about the freedom, the rights of Englishmen to be free to trade in slaves. The freedom thing also goes. two ways because you know you have these um thrusting sharp elbowed young men who want to do

more than the monopoly allows them to but you also have you know in in what is now benin you know the kings of da homie saying actually we want to do more as well we want to sell more slaves to anyone who's coming why do we have to be pinned down by your stupid monopoly and so free ports are created for the sake of shipping out more human beings from this part of the African coast And this whole revulsion in England, not to the slave trade, but to the treatment of slavers by the Royal Africa Company, becomes something that Parliament takes up. And it becomes an argument against the the stewards who are not only wanting the divine right of kings and this absolute monarchy that the stewards keep pressing for against the prerogatives of Parliament. But they're also pushing for. for their Royal Africa Company's monopoly, because that's what's generating the money. So Parliament begins to gird its loins for the end of the Royal African Companies Monopoly. Which era are we talking about here with that?

I mean, are we talking glorious revolution? This is on the run-up to the glorious revolution. Okay, all right. So they're already getting fed up with them. This is part of the rhetoric of the glorious revolution. That we need to kick the stewards out because they're ridiculous. You need to kick the stewards out because not only are they misbehaving against Parliament, they're also hogging the slave trade and making all the money from it.

So there's a huge economic argument behind the glorious revolution. And as soon as the glorious revolution takes place. So we should actually say what the glorious revolution is because we were sort of banding it around. But this is a time in 1688 when Parliament, as William says, so sick of the stewards in their antics,

says, okay, we'll have a new monarch. We don't want you anymore. And they invite William III and Mary to invade England and take control. Mary being a Stuart Princess, who's married the Duke of Orange. The Duke of Orange. So, you know, this is a Dutch royal family who are, you know, begged to come over by Parliament in 1688, saying, can you just come and take this on because we don't like this lot?

And this is known as the Glorious Revolution. Join us after the break when we find out how this trade fares under the Glorious Revolution. Welcome back. So, William, we just talked before the break about how the Stuart's as sort of, you know, bogarting the whole of the slave trade and not allowing others in and their monopoly is getting on everybody's nerves, not the fact that slaving people may be wrong, but the fact that more people can't do it. The crowd is hogging the profits.

Right. So then we've got William and Mary who come to the throne. How do things change under their way? Well, part of the whole idea of the glorious revolution, I mean, there's a whole, we're simplifying a complicated, an important bit of English history here. But one of the things that the oranges and the glorious revolution are buying into is this idea of getting rid of the Royal African Company's monopoly and more free trade, which is the great cry of the time. And 1689, a court case between the Royal African Company begins and a man called Jeffrey Nightingale, independent slave trader. And the court rules that the Royal African Company could keep their monopoly, but they could no longer.

going to detain independent traders and force them to forfeit their goods. And this means that basically the company loses its right to enforce its monopoly. So no more white guys getting locked up in Ghana and sent off to the plantations. And this is taken by traders up and down, particularly the west coast of England and the provinces outside London as the go signal. So your Bristol's and your Liverpool's and anybody else who wants to become involved? Liverpool at this point, a tiny village almost. It's a tiny port. But Bristol are made. shipping center. They see this as the moment that they can get their ships into the act. And it seems as it like almost like an endorsement of independent slave trading. So you move from a

system where you have one company under the crown hogging the profits and managing the trade in the eyes of the plantation owners very inefficiently because they're not providing enough ships. There's not enough voyages. There's not enough slaves in the in the Caribbean to do the work. And suddenly now free enterprise is unleashed onto the slave trade. And of course, the result is an enormous quantum increase in the numbers involved in this hideous trade. So just so again, if you missed one of our earlier episodes on this, you know, and up until this point, slaves had been branded across their chest with D-O-Y, Duke of York or RAC, Royal African Company. But now I suppose you've got different interests involved.

I mean, it doesn't mean that there's tops. It just means that there are different sorts of brands going around now. So if you were, for example, a Bristol merchant who had been involved in trading with the Mediterranean at this point, maybe buying currents from Greece, from our friends, the Levant company, whatever it is, you can now are free to set your ship into the Bristol Channel, go to West Africa on your own, establish your own relationships with the King of Benin, buy as many slaves as he will sell you and go off on your own bat to the Caribbean

and take it to a slave market and sell it and make the profits yourself. So you're free to do whatever you like. But the short figure, the key figure, is that in the next half century, the volume of trade goes up by about 300%. Okay. I mean, that's, again, there are miserable numbers

and miserable numbers. Also, you know, actually, this number is fascinating to me. the Royal African Company's share of the English slave trade within, we're talking about 1698 when they lose their monopoly, 1701. So just a matter of three years, their share of the slave trade falls from 88% to 8%. So they haven't been wound up. They haven't been abolished. But as this inefficient old creaky monopoly, it can't compete with the new traders, particularly coming out of the West Coast of England, particularly from Bristol. Everybody's doing more. That's what that number tells you. That gives you an idea of just how I'm wateringly fast, this grows. So, I mean, in our own time, I suppose it's a bit like BT being privatised or it's deregulation. And the state loses control over a particular industry.

But the idea is that suddenly something that was a monopoly and was restricted to a few privileged people is now open to anyone. And the result is a massive increase in plantation slavery, a massive increase in human. and trafficking. And is it true that, you know, the British then, because they're good at this, and they've been doing this slaving for a very long time, do they become slavist for other countries in the process? Well, it isn't that they've been doing it a long time, because in a sense, the Spanish and the Portuguese have a march on them in that. But if you look at the graphs in the histories of slavery, you find that the British are above the Dutch, who are above the French, who by the early 18th century above the Spanish of the Portuguese. But once it's opened up,

the British graph goes on a sort of massive, steep increase and all the others gutter almost completely, other than the Portuguese who continue to send slaves to Brazil. Right. But Britain becomes suddenly, at this point, by the beginning of the 18th century, the shipping agency, the slave shipper for the world and makes massive amounts of money on the back of this terrible, terrible trade. And I mean, this trade, this terrible trade in human beings boosts industries all over England. I mean, things, you know, that are obvious like shipbuilding, and that quadruples.

Well, again, the government's doing very well out of this. They're taxing sugar and tobacco. So the state itself is getting more money to spend. Yeah, but you're also getting, you know, sort of burgeoning industry. So shipbuilding starts to become very excitable. You've got new designs which are coming forward just to react to the speed with which these companies are demanding shipbuilding. So you've got innovation coming. You've got straight things like the wool industry gets a boom through exports.

Because, you know, if you've got a triangular trade, you want to go somewhere and you want to trade something, then, you know, wool gets a boost. You're selling woollies to Berlin? Well, I think it must be. Or, you know, just fabrics that people haven't seen before. It's so, you know, it is a fact. The wool industry gets a hoikers. up during this time. And presumably you get hideous new industries such as making chains, manacles and brands

and that kind of stuff. I'm sure you're right. I'm sure you're right. There is an estimate by 1750 almost every town in England was connected with the slave trade. In some way. Just take that in. Wow. Okay.

But the big transformation is the West Coast. And as we said, we've seen the Rolfica Company very much monopolized by the court and by London merchants, but suddenly Bristol and Liverpool. Well, let's talk about Liverpool, because you said it was started off as a teeny tiny place. Tell us what happens to Liverpool during this time. So the figures I've got here, 1565, Liverpool has only 138 householders. It's just crazy. Seven inhabited streets and 12 ships operating out of it.

And then it rapidly expands. And between 1709 and 7071, the shipping entering Liverpool increases by four and a half times. and the number of sailors in the port by six times, and the city is completely transformed. It becomes the greatest slave port in the old world. And by 1795, Liverpool has five-eighths of British slave trade and three-sevenths of the entire European slave trade. So this is totally transformative.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's shocking at how quickly, you know, this brings riches to the British Isles. There is an apocry tale. it with you. I don't know. It may not be true, but there's a story in Liverpool that an actor appears on stage in Liverpool and not for the first time he's

well, Mary is a fart, shall we say he's quite drunk, okay? Very, very drunk. And the crowd his hisses at him. So his response is recorded, I have not come here to be insulted by a set of wretches, every brick in whose infernal town is cemented with an

African's blood. So that's interesting, because that's the first time you've heard. He heard any descent. But we don't know if it's true. Brit. I don't know. If somebody knows if that's true or not, please let me know. Tell us about Manchester, because again, Manchester similarly transformed in this. So we've talked about these three products of the Caribbean slave economies. Number one is sugar, and that's the thing that generates everything. It's the biggest thing. And as tea gets going exactly at this period, imported from China, bought in China with the proceeds of the opium trade, which is at this time doing terrible things

to the peasantry in Bihar who are made to trample the opium poppy and become its victims too. So as all this is going, the second trade is cotton. So cotton, which was something produced in India, then becomes something produced in Egypt, finally becomes the great crop of the American South and the Caribbean is shipped back and it's processed not in the Caribbean, it's processed in Manchester. Right. So Manchester now becomes the Cottonopolis. And we saw that recent series of articles in The Guardian,

in the Guardian's excellent series on the Manchester Garden, whereby the same people who are investing, even in the Liberal Manchester Guardian, are getting their money from the cotton, which in turn is coming from the slave economy. So, William, we've talked about the impact, of course, on Britain and this accelerated growth and the same. cities which have suddenly become very, very profitable because of the trade in slavery. We really

should talk about the impact on Africa as well, because if you need to sate the thirst for this human labour, these human beings who are going to work on the plantations and work as your slaves, you're going to have to win battles against rival tribes. You're going to have to subdue other people to round up their human beings to put them on these ships. Well, I think this is something, it's a hugely interesting and important subject in itself, the effect of the slave trade on West Africa. What does it mean to a region of the globe if 12 million people are kidnapped and transported somewhere else? I mean, already we have in history, when Kat Jarman was talking about the scale of the Slavs being transported down to the Byzantine and Arab slave

markets or when you've got the Vikings taking people from the West Coast to Scotland, particularly women and moving them to Iceland. This is all, you know, it changes the history radically of the areas that the slaves are taken from. But this is on a faster scale by, you know, a huge, it's 12 million people. So I really think we need a whole episode looking at the effect on... I agree with you. We do. We do. But I mean, I think we should just just now, just very briefly, you're right. We definitely do. And I'm completely up for that. But just very briefly, the point that I was trying to make is that if you need to supply this gaping mouth that's hungry for your humanity, you need guns. And that is something that is introduced to

West Africa by the British. The trade in weaponry, the trade in guns that happens, it's almost like an incitement for more intertribal conflict. Because if you give one king or the firearms, he can subdue all of his neighbors, he can then round up their people and put them in the ships. And so that's sort of destabilizing the violence that comes with this slave trade, you need to acknowledge that that's a terrible, and some may say lasting legacy of slavery. Well, I would say that this, I think the Portuguese begin with this, because you get Portuguese muskets being sold way before in the 16th and early 17th century. But again, what changes with the introduction of the Royal Africa Company and the English in the picture,

is the industrial scale of it. You have large numbers of firearms. And with the profits that are made, you have far more African slaving parties moving into the interior, taking people and transporting them to the forts on the coast. Yeah, you're not going to transport your people, so you will just keep encroaching on other people's land

and taking their people to meet the quotas, if you like. And, you know, if your wealth is all deriving from this trade, you don't have to make anything or develop anything else, because you're making money from this. But it is a hugely destabilising force. Not only are you denuding great areas of land of its population. You're creating huge instability, insecurity. People can only operate out of fortified citadels,

or they're taking a huge risk if they're just living in an undefended settlement and so on. Can we talk about rum? Because rum plays a really, I mean, it's not a fun role either, because it sort of figures in some of the kind of, ugly deals that are drawn up. First of all, just tell us, is rum new to the world with the discovery of sugar and plantations? Exactly. Rum is a byproduct of molasses, which is a boy product of the sugar trade.

And unlike almost everything else, which is shipped to England to be manufactured, so tobacco is turned into smoking tobacco and dried in English factories. The cotton is processed in Manchester. unlike those two, rum is actually made in the Caribbean. And when you go to the Caribbean today, you still see these ruins of these huge rum distilleries with these enormous towering chimneys, which are on the edge of the sugar refineries. And this becomes the drink of the Caribbean, as it still is. And it becomes an item of trade in itself.

So you have slavers famously taking rum to West Africa and getting their intermediaries drunk and allegedly sometimes getting them so drunk, they actually enslave the slavers. Right, right. Yeah, that's sort of what I was alluding to. We should, I mean, we will talk again in more detail about this experience of going across the Middle Passage. But it's also very interesting.

I mean, when they're taking to the Carolinas and to America, there's a categorization. There's like a sorting hat episode that goes on. And that is just appalling as well. These are some of the things that I, you know, find so difficult that they keep me up at night. So, you know, Angolan's were seen as worthless. Coramandheim, so that's from Ghana, were good workers, but too rebellious. Mandingoes, who were people from Senegal, were prone to theft.

Ebo's, Nigeria, were timid and despondent. Women and children were less valuable, and robust males came for the highest cost because they would live longer and work harder. The Brits do this all over their imperial world. And there's a book called The Tribes and Peoples of India published just after the Great Uprising of 1857's called in Britain, the Indian Mutiny. And it's a two-volume book that I browse through. And it has photographs in this sort of quasi-scientific way. So eugenics of the different tribes and caste.

And, you know, describes the Indian Muslim as worthless and lazy. and perfidious and so on and so forth. But you find similar stuff going on in Europe and the British developed this hierarchy of race at this point with themselves at the top and with blacks at the bottom and with Jews and gypsies and Catholics, Irish Catholics somewhere in between. And with that comes this awful business of, you know,

nose measuring and forehead breadth and this sort of quasi-fake science of of the human physiognomy and trying to rank human beings into different groups in a hierarchical way. And there's also this notion of seasoning slaves, which is just appalling. So you've brought these poor, terrified, half-dead people from their lands. And you then try and immediately tell them what their life of slavery is going to be. And so they are brutalized, they are whipped, they are beaten, they're immediately, they're seasoned. for the life that lies ahead of them. So that is something we'll go into in more detail

a little later on in this series. Look, William, I've got one really important question for you. Now it's become so ubiquitous slavery. Now every city is benefiting. Every trade is burgeoning. Now, you know, people are employed because of it and through it. Are there any voices now raised up saying, actually this may be wrong? This may not be Christian? In my reading, almost nothing. That is the huge surprise of this. The fact that there's almost, I mean, for example, there is a huge public outcry against what the East India Company is doing in India. Clive is booed and hissed in the streets of London. There's a play at the Haymarket, which calls him Lord Vulture over this heap of corpses after the Bengal famine. So it isn't like, you know, you have people who are completely insensitive. And yet I have read in the early part of this, story up until the, I don't know, the 1750s, almost nothing. What about the church? What's the church?

It's the church not saying anything. I mean, you know. Church supported the trade. It's going to be Christian missionaries who change it with will before. So the church supports it. In what way do we know it supports it? Well, and there also is distinction between the Catholics and the Protestants, although they both support the slave trade.

If you go, remember Nabil mentioned in the last episode, these pictures you see all over Europe of cardinals with these sort of black enslaved servants around them. Servants around them, yes, yes. And the only distinction is that the Spaniards look to convert their slaves to Christianity, but the British don't. And so you don't have missionaries operating in the English plantations in the way that you do, for example, in Spanish, Latin America, where the Jesuits are very active. Quakers are the one exception, I think.

Quakers do. Quakers who initially families like the fries and these Quaker families coming out of Bristol are initially involved in the slave trade and then very early move against it and change to the chocolate industry. So you get fries chocolate delight in the end rather than fries slaves. And also, you know, the other part of this is, and we mentioned to Edward Cawson, who has been in our news recently in recent times, is that they make so much money that they become philanthropists in their own areas. And so they're lauded for their Christian values and their generosity. They become the sort of local patron saints, Christian, moral and good. So we should say at this point that, of course, we are aware and we are going to deal with now

the crucial role that Britain plays in the abolition of slavery. This is not something we're going to ignore. We're going to go into it in detail later in the episode. So anyone's sitting there frothing, thinking that we're demeaning this country by talking about talking about talking about about the slave trade, but not mentioning that this was the one country that abolished it. We are going to deal with that in fourth. But both Anita and I, when we were discussing the series in advance, took the view that in the British curriculum, what you really learn most about is abolition, not about the slave trade. And it's the abolition which is foregrounded in our consciousness.

And the British pat themselves on the back for ending. Quite rightly. Quite rightly. Quite rightly. Quite rightly. For ending the slave trade, when this was something which has existed through human history, as we've seen from ancient Egyptian times right through to the Caribbean slave trade. And it is the British who are the first to abolish it in a formal legal way.

But in the process of celebrating that, we don't go into the horrible details that we've been talking about today, and which we will be talking about over the next month. Well, that's it for this episode of Empire. So it's goodbye for me, Anita Arnan. Goodbye for me, William Dalrymple.