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“Legitimate commerce” in the Eighteenth Century: The Royal African Company of England Under the Duke of Chandos, 1720–1726

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2015

Matthew David Mitchell
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Abstract

Following the loss in 1712 of its previous monopoly over British trade with West Africa, the Royal African Company found itself unable to compete with smaller, lower-cost British slave traders and nearly collapsed entirely. Salvation seemed to arrive in 1720 in the person of James Brydges, the Duke of Chandos, who led a massive re-capitalization of the company and made the strategic decision to move its focus to the commodity trade between Europe and Africa and on the search for new botanical and mineral resources in Africa itself. While Chandos directed the RAC’s employees in implementing this radical new scheme, he kept it secret from his fellow shareholders, leading them to believe that his plans were aimed at revitalizing the company’s mature but declining line of business in the transatlantic slave trade. The Duke’s strategy, however, proved overly ambitious and failed to reverse the company’s decline.

Type
Manuscript
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , September 2013 , pp. 544 - 578
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2013. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

I would like to acknowledge the editorial staff and anonymous readers at Enterprise and Society for helping to guide this article towards publication. A version of this article was originally presented at the meeting of the Business History Conference in Philadelphia, PA on March 31, 2012, where it benefited from the comments of Cathy Mattson, D’Maris Coffman, Michael Wagner, and Thomas Max Safley. I received further feedback at a meeting of the Triangle Global British History Seminar in Research Triangle Park, NC on November 2, 2012, especially from Philip Stern, Brent Sirota, and Megan Cherry. Thanks are also due to Lisa Lindsay, Terry McIntosh, and the rest of the University of North Carolina Department of History; Margo Todd, Antonio Feros, Lynn Hollen Lees, and Kathleen Brown at the University of Pennsylvania Department of History; The National Archives in London; and the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, where Mary Robertson was of particular assistance. Finally, I thank my parents, Duke and Janet Mitchell; my wife, Elizabeth Leffler-Mitchell; and our three children, Malkelm, Maxwell, and Emmelia for their unfailing love and support. As this article deals with an early modern topic, it is necessary to note that all dates are given Old Style according to the calendar then in use in Britain, but the year is taken as beginning on January 1 rather than March 25. In most cases “Britain” and “British” are used rather than “England” and “English” due to the merger of England and Scotland into the United Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707.

References

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