Discover our ‘Royal African Company’ Primary Source Series

Explore the history of the Royal African Company, its role in the British slave trade, and the types of records it produced through one of The Social History Archive’s Primary Source Series, which brings together themes of race, empire, trade, and social history.

The Royal African Company

The ‘Britain, Royal African Company’ Primary Source Series contains over 1,400 records held at The National Archives, part of the T 70 series, Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading with Africa and Successors. Covering the years 1694 to 1743, the records provide unparalleled information about thousands of individuals who travelled aboard the Royal African Company’s ships to and from Africa, as well as those who lived and died at the numerous company forts.

The Royal African Company operated as a mercantile company from 1660 until its dissolution in 1750. It was first incorporated as the Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading with Africa and reconstituted in 1672 as the Royal African Company of England. The company held a monopoly over trade in West Africa until 1698 and was primarily engaged in the slave trade to the British colonies until the 1720s, when it became insolvent. The company’s assets and ports were then vested in the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa. This company was incorporated by Act of Parliament in 1750, and finally abolished in 1821.

The Royal African Company played a significant role in the transatlantic slave trade, an abhorrent chapter of world history which saw millions of African men, women and children enslaved. Historians have estimated that between 1701 and 1800, approximately 40% of over 6 million enslaved African individuals were transported by British ships ⁽¹⁾. It took years of campaigning for the abolition of the slave trade in Britain, which was finally achieved in 1807, although the enslaved people were not freed until 1838. Understandably, its repercussions continued to persist for much longer. The records produced by the company provide an invaluable resource for studying this important yet dark chapter of British and world history.

Race, Empire and Postcolonial Studies

Several accounts included in this collection offer insights into contemporary attitudes on race during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, making these records particularly relevant for researchers, historians, and students working on matters of race, empire, colonialism, and postcolonial studies. Non-European individuals were often described using terms such as ‘black’, ‘negro’, and ‘mulatto’, as illustrated by the image below. This collection will be of great interest to those exploring topics of identity, otherness, perception, race, and division during this period.

This image provides a close-up of one of the accounts known as ‘lists of living and dead at the forts’, covering the years 1740 to 1746. As the account’s name suggests, it collected the names of individuals at the different ports controlled by the Royal African Company. This specific fragment includes the names of 17 individuals, categorised according to rank and race. Some are identified as ‘mulatto soldiers and gunners’ as well as ‘black soldiers’ living in two of the forts where the company operated. These forts were Tantumquerry and Winnebah (or Winnebagh), both located on the Gold Coast. Our collection provides access to this and many more records and their associated transcripts.

Further information provided by the records

Since its formation, the Royal African Company established forts and trading posts along the African coast. The company set up its headquarters at Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) and controlled dozens of ports and enclaves in the River Gambia, the Gold Coast, and Sierra Leone—all of which are searchable within our collection. In order to build and operate these African forts and trading posts, the company brought traders, merchants, seamen, miners, carpenters, bricklayers, surgeons, native interpreters, and even distillers to them. The records contained in our Royal African Company series also provide further insights about these individuals, as they include detailed lists of their names, occupations, and wages, providing historians with a key tool to uncover their roles within the company, their day-to-day living conditions and the cost of their labour.

For example, a fragment from 1699 shows that a surgeon named Thomas Langley was among the individuals aboard the vessel known as the Warrington, en route to Cape Coast Castle. His wages amounted to £40 per year, the equivalent of today’s £4,000, to be paid in full ⁽²⁾.

Together with numerous images from the original accounts, our collection also provides transcripts that contain key information and transcriptions of the names within these passenger lists, as shown in the image below.

These transcriptions provide a useful tool for researchers and students alike when approaching these records.

Conclusion

The Royal African Company Primary Source Series is an invaluable resource for historians of race and empire and is the result of our long-term partnership with The National Archives. The accounts included in this series comprise lists of passengers, crew members, and individuals living and dying in the forts, as well as registers of officers, lists of freemen, and merchants. This collection offers unparalleled insight into the final decades of British active and sanctioned involvement in the slave trade with Africa.

Footnotes

1. (1) Marika Sherwood, ‘Britain, Slavery and the Trade in enslaved Africans’, History in Focus 12 (2007), https://archives.history.ac.uk/history-in-focus/Slavery/articles (accessed: 20 September 2024).
2. (2) This equivalence has been calculated using ‘Currency converter: 1270-2017’, The National Archives, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter (accessed: 20 September 2024).