Historical interpretations of Britain's role in the transatlantic slave trade have, until recently, placed a disproportionate emphasis on abolitionist campaigning activity and achievements in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. This trend can be traced back to Thomas Clarkson's influential History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament published in 1808, the year after the passage of the bill to abolish the slave trade. The attention given to the work of humanitarian campaigners has tended to obscure Britain's position as the most prolific and efficient slavetrading nation in the eighteenth century.

James Irving was among the many thousands of British men who contributed to the enforced migration of Africans in the transatlantic slave trade. This young Scottish surgeon undertook his first slaving venture from the port of Liverpool in 1783. During his career in Liverpool he was employed by John Dawson, Britain's leading slave merchant and ‘possibly the world's leading slave trader’. As a surgeon on Guinea ships, Irving faced a very high risk of mortality but this position was also ‘the second most profitable on a slave vessel’. Respected by his superior officers, Irving made rapid progress in the trade and was offered his first captaincy of a slave ship in 1789.

Irving also persuaded his younger cousin and namesake to leave Scotland to take up a career as a surgeon in the Liverpool slave trade. Such family links were not unusual. Other captains and officers had relatives who were engaged in the Liverpool slave trade. As Behrendt points out, a ‘few sons followed their fathers as captains in the slave trade’. Richard and John Kendall, both slaveship captains in Liverpool in the late eighteenth century, were the sons of John Kendall who captained several Liverpool vessels in the 1760s and 1770s. A number of brothers served as slave-ship captains, including Hugh and William Crow and James and Thomas Stowell.

James Irving's career sheds light on the brutal reification of Africans in the transatlantic slave trade, an accepted feature of British commerce for most of the eighteenth century. Abolitionist voices were raised in protest at various intervals in the eighteenth century.