Royal African Company chartered, expanding England's slave trade
- Date
- 1672
- Category
- Economy & trade
- Region
- England and West African coast
- Era
- Early Modern
- Significance
In 1672 King Charles II granted a royal charter to the Royal African Company, reorganised from the bankrupt Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa and headed by his brother James, Duke of York.
The charter gave the company a monopoly on English trade with West Africa, the right to build forts and factories, maintain troops and exercise martial law along the Gold Coast and Bight of Benin. Through the 1680s it shipped roughly 5,000 captives a year and between 1672 and 1731 financed voyages that carried close to 190,000 enslaved Africans to England's American and Caribbean colonies, branding many with the company's initials. The Royal African Company institutionalised English participation in the Atlantic slave trade and laid the commercial infrastructure that, after its monopoly lapsed in 1698, allowed a flood of independent traders from Bristol, Liverpool and London to make Britain the dominant slaving power of the eighteenth century. Its forts also entangled English merchants directly in the politics of coastal African states such as the rising Asante and Dahomey. The company embodied the fusion of crown, finance and human trafficking that drove the plantation economies of the early modern Atlantic world.
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Empires active in 1672
- Mughal Empire1526 CE – 1857 CE
- Portuguese Empire1415 CE – 1999 CE
- Solomonic dynasty1270 CE – 1974 CE
- Ottoman Empire1299 CE – 1922 CE
- Spanish Empire1492 CE – 1976 CE
- Qing Dynasty1636 CE – 1912 CE
Related economy & trade events
- Founding of the Bank of England27 July 1694
- Founding of the English and Dutch East India Companies1600–1602
- Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations9 March 1776
- Britain wins the Asiento at the Treaty of Utrecht1713
- Founding of the Bank of Amsterdam (Wisselbank)31 January 1609
- Joint-stock companies and the world's first stock exchange1600–1611 (VOC chartered 20 March 1602; exchange opened 1611)
Further reading
The wider story
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
Best-selling world history told through the trade routes that moved goods, faiths and ideas.
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