Slavers

In early 1701, a twenty-year-old man named Nathaniel Uring signed on as second mate of a ship called the Martha, which was to set sail that April from London on a slaving voyage to Guinea in Africa. Uring came from a Quaker household in the Norfolk village of Walsingham. His introduction to the slaving economy had been through a voyage he made as a teenager to Barbados and then Virginia in 1698–9 on a merchant ship that had also sailed from London. After these voyages, Uring was willing to become involved in any aspect of the slaving economy from which he could turn a profit. He traded molasses in Barbados, tobacco in Virginia, sugar in Antigua, and smuggled enslaved Africans from Jamaica to South America. He eventually retired to his home village to run a wine import business, staffed by an African who appears to have been held in near slavery.

While the seventeenth century had seen the foundations being laid, it was in the eighteenth that the British slave-based economy reached its peak of economic, social, and political importance. At the core of this expansion was sugar, which played a vital part in the growth of consumer culture in British life. This development in consumption was made possible by the appearance and success of agrarian capitalism and, in turn, contributed to industrialisation by stimulating manufacturing. In 1700, the British Isles imported 23,000 tons of sugar; one hundred years later, this had grown to 245,000 tons. By 1800, the colonies were providing nearly 20 per cent of England’s imports, while purchasing nearly ten per cent of England’s exports. As demand for these products grew, so did the Atlantic system, which came to incorporate the governments, business communities, inhabitants, and economies of Europe, Africa, and the Americas – along with Asia, since Asian textiles were the largest single export used for enslaved Africans – into a vast trading nexus. Thousands of ships plied the sea routes across the Atlantic, carrying the essential elements of a booming international economy; millions of people, foodstuffs, raw materials, and manufactured goods of all kinds. Fortunes were made (and lost) by men willing to take the huge risks entailed in engaging in this commerce over thousands of miles, via trading journeys lasting months, or even years.