Royal African Company: England's Monopoly Slave-Trading Company

The Royal African Company was the English chartered company that held a monopoly on trade with West Africa in the late 17th century. Founded in 1660 as the Company of Royal Adventurers into Africa and refounded in 1672, it was led by James, Duke of York, and built a chain of forts on the African coast. It became the largest single English slave-trading organisation, shipping well over a hundred thousand Africans to the Americas before losing its monopoly in 1698.

Origins: the Royal Adventurers

After the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, members of the new court looked to Africa for profit. In December 1660 the king granted a charter to the Company of Royal Adventurers into Africa, headed by his brother James, Duke of York, with Prince Rupert of the Rhine among the leading backers. At first the company hoped above all for gold, but its new charter of 1663 explicitly included trade in enslaved people, who were in rising demand on the sugar plantations of Barbados and Jamaica.

The company’s ambitions led it into conflict with the Dutch, who dominated the Gold Coast. In 1664 an English expedition under Robert Holmes seized several Dutch posts, contributing to the outbreak of the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667). A Dutch fleet under Michiel de Ruyter retook most of them, and the war left the company deep in debt.

The Royal African Company of 1672

In 1672 the Royal Adventurers were replaced by a new Royal African Company, again with the Duke of York as governor. Its charter granted it the sole right among the English to trade along the African coast from the Sallee in Morocco to the Cape of Good Hope for a thousand years. It could build forts, keep soldiers and seize the ships of English “interlopers” who traded without its permission.

The company established its West African headquarters at Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast and maintained forts and trading posts at places such as James Island in the Gambia River, Bunce Island in Sierra Leone and Ouidah on the Slave Coast. Ships from London carried textiles, metal goods, guns, alcohol and cowrie shells to Africa to exchange for gold, ivory, dyewood and enslaved people.

How the company worked

The Royal African Company was a joint-stock company: investors bought shares and received dividends from its profits. It was run from London by a governor, a sub-governor, a deputy governor and a Court of Assistants elected by the shareholders, with offices at African House in Leadenhall Street. Its early investors included members of the royal family, courtiers, government officials and wealthy City merchants.

On the African coast the company employed agents, clerks, soldiers and craftsmen in its forts. Disease, especially malaria and yellow fever, killed a high proportion of the Europeans sent out, often within a year or two of arrival. The forts depended on African rulers, who rented out the land, controlled access to inland markets and expected regular payments and gifts. The company could not simply dictate terms; it had to bargain with powerful states and merchants on the coast.

The company and the slave trade

The company bought captives from African rulers and merchants, many of them people taken in wars and raids in the interior. They were held in the forts until ships arrived, then carried across the Atlantic, mostly to Barbados, Jamaica and other English Caribbean islands, and in smaller numbers to the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland. Some captives were branded with the company’s initials.

Historians estimate that between 1672 and the early 1730s the company’s ships carried roughly 150,000 to 190,000 Africans, of whom many thousands died on the voyage from disease, hunger and brutal conditions. This made it the largest single English institution in the slave trade, though private traders eventually carried far more people overall.

Gold also mattered. Much of the gold the company brought to England was minted into coins. The guinea, first struck in 1663, took its name from the Guinea coast, and coins made from company gold often bore its emblem of an elephant, sometimes with a castle on its back.

Key people

• James, Duke of York (1633–1701): governor of the company, later King James II.
• Charles II (1630–1685): granted the charters and was a shareholder.
• Prince Rupert of the Rhine (1619–1682): royalist commander and early promoter of the venture.
• Edward Colston (1636–1721): Bristol-born merchant who was a shareholder and senior official in the 1680s and 1690s.
• John Locke (1632–1704): the philosopher, who held shares in the company for a time.

Decline and end of the monopoly

The monopoly was unpopular with merchants in Bristol, Liverpool and the colonies, who wanted to trade freely, and planters complained that the company did not supply enough enslaved workers. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688 removed James II, the company lost its royal protector and Parliament became more willing to listen to its critics.

The Trade with Africa Act of 1698 opened the African trade to all English merchants, who paid a 10 per cent duty on goods exported to Africa to help maintain the company’s forts. These traders were nicknamed the “ten per cent men”. The act was passed for a limited period, and the long political battle over whether the African trade should be a monopoly or open to all continued in Parliament and in a flood of printed pamphlets. The company argued that only a single, well-funded body could maintain the forts needed to protect English trade against European rivals; its opponents argued that free trade would bring more enslaved workers to the colonies at lower prices. Private merchants quickly outpaced the company. It stopped trading in enslaved people in the early 1730s, focusing on ivory and gold, and in 1752 it was dissolved and replaced by the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, which ran the forts with government funding.

Legacy

The Royal African Company played a central role in establishing England’s place in the Atlantic slave trade and in supplying labour to the plantation economies of the Caribbean and North America. Its name became prominent again in public debate in 2020, when the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol was toppled during protests, and institutions in Britain have since examined their historical links to the company.

Historians have also noted an uncomfortable irony. The campaign against the company’s monopoly was fought in the language of liberty and free trade, yet its main result was to open the slave trade to many more merchants. In the decades after 1698 the number of Africans carried on British ships rose sharply.

Timeline

• 1660, December: Charles II charters the Company of Royal Adventurers into Africa.
• 1663: A new charter adds the slave trade; the first guinea coins are struck.
• 1664: Robert Holmes’s expedition attacks Dutch posts in West Africa.
• 1665–1667: The Second Anglo-Dutch War leaves the company in debt.
• 1672: The Royal African Company is founded with a new monopoly charter.
• 1688: The Glorious Revolution removes its governor, now James II.
• 1698: The Trade with Africa Act ends the monopoly.
• 1752: The company is dissolved.

Why it matters

The Royal African Company shows how closely the English state, the royal family and leading investors were involved in the Atlantic slave trade. By building forts and networks that private traders later used, it helped make Britain the largest slave-trading nation of the 18th century.