The Prince of Slavers

<p>Much scholarship on the British transatlantic slave trade has focused on its peak period in the late eighteenth century and its abolition in the early nineteenth; or on the Royal African Company (RAC), which in 1698 lost the monopoly it had previously enjoyed over the trade.&nbsp;During the early eighteenth-century transition between these two better-studied periods, Humphry Morice was by far the most prolific of the British slave traders.&nbsp; He bears the guilt for trafficking over 25,000 enslaved Africans, and his voluminous surviving papers offer intriguing insights into how he did it. </p><p>Morice’s strategy was well adapted for managing the special risks of the trade, and for duplicating, at lower cost, the RAC’s capabilities for gathering information on what African slave-sellers wanted in exchange.&nbsp; Still, Morice’s transatlantic operations were expensive enough to drive him to a series of increasingly dubious financial manoeuvres throughout the 1720s, and eventually to large-scale fraud in 1731 from the Bank of England, of which he was a longtime director.&nbsp; He died later that year, probably by suicide, and with his estate hopelessly indebted to the Bank, his family, and his ship captains.&nbsp; Nonetheless, his astonishing rise and fall marked a turning point in the development of the brutal transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans.</p><div><p></p></div>