Royal African Company
Based on Wikipedia: Royal African Company
The Company That Branded Human Beings
In the 1680s, thousands of African men, women, and children had three letters seared into their chests with a hot iron: D-o-Y. The initials stood for the Duke of York—the brother of England's king and the man who ran one of history's most prolific slave-trading enterprises. When the Duke became King James II in 1685, the branding continued, though sometimes with different letters: R-A-C, for the Royal African Company.
This was not a rogue operation. It was a government-sanctioned monopoly, backed by the English crown, financed by London's wealthiest merchants, and designed to extract human beings from West Africa with industrial efficiency. The Royal African Company would go on to transport more enslaved Africans to the Americas than any other single institution in the entire history of the Atlantic slave trade.
That claim is worth pausing on. Not "one of the largest." Not "among the most significant." The single largest institutional slave trader across four centuries of forced migration. And it operated under royal charter, with the blessing of Parliament, and the investment capital of English society's elite.
How a Gold Rush Became a Human Harvest
The Royal African Company began, as so many atrocities do, with gold.
In 1660, Charles II had just returned to the English throne after years of exile during the Commonwealth period under Oliver Cromwell. The monarchy was back, and it was hungry for revenue. Prince Rupert of the Rhine, a dashing military commander and Charles's cousin, had identified gold deposits along the Gambia River during the Interregnum—the period between Charles I's execution and Charles II's restoration.
On December 18, 1660, the newly restored king granted a charter to what was first called the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa. The word "adventurers" here meant investors, though the term now carries an almost obscene irony. The company's stated purpose was gold mining. Its oversight committee included earls, knights, and wealthy merchants. The Duke of York—the future King James II—served as its governor.
Gold, however, proved elusive. Slaves did not.
By 1663, a revised charter explicitly mentioned the trade in human beings. The company was now authorized to deal in "redwood, elephants' teeth, negroes, slaves, hides, wax, guinea grains, or other commodities." Note how casually the document lists enslaved people alongside elephant tusks and tree bark. This linguistic flattening—treating humans as just another commodity—was not accidental. It was the conceptual framework that made the trade possible.
The Geography of Extraction
To understand how the Royal African Company operated, you need to understand the physical reality of the West African coast in the seventeenth century.
European traders rarely ventured inland. The reasons were practical: tropical diseases killed Europeans at terrifying rates, the interior was controlled by African kingdoms with their own interests, and the coastal trading posts—called "factories"—served as efficient chokepoints for commerce. Europeans controlled these fortified stations, but they held no sovereignty over the surrounding land or its people.
The coastal African kingdoms served as intermediaries. They conducted raids and wars in the interior, captured prisoners, and sold them to European buyers at the factories. This arrangement suited both parties in a narrow commercial sense, though it would reshape African societies in catastrophic ways over the following centuries.
The Royal African Company's most important base was Cape Coast Castle, in what is now Ghana. This was the "Gold Coast"—named not for its beaches but for the precious metal that first drew Europeans there. Cape Coast Castle still stands today, a whitewashed fortress overlooking the Atlantic. Beneath its elegant courtyards lie dungeons where enslaved Africans were held before being forced through the "Door of No Return" onto ships bound for the Caribbean.
The company also established Fort James about twenty miles up the Gambia River, Fort Sekondi, Fort Winneba, Fort Apollonia, and several other installations along the coast. Each served as a node in a network designed for one purpose: moving human beings from Africa to the Americas as efficiently as possible.
The Business of Dehumanization
At its peak in the 1680s, the Royal African Company was transporting approximately five thousand enslaved people per year across the Atlantic. The destinations were primarily Caribbean sugar colonies—Jamaica, Barbados, and the islands that made English merchants fantastically wealthy.
The numbers are difficult to fully grasp, so it helps to break them down. Between 1672 and 1731, the Royal African Company transported 187,697 enslaved people on 653 voyages. That averages to roughly 287 human beings per ship, crammed into holds designed for cargo, not passengers.
Of those 187,697 people, 38,497 died during the Middle Passage—the horrific weeks-long journey across the Atlantic. That's a mortality rate of about twenty percent. One in five people loaded onto these ships never reached the other side.
The company's predecessor organization, the Company of Royal Adventurers, had transported an additional 26,925 enslaved people between 1662 and 1672, with 6,620 dying en route—a mortality rate of nearly twenty-five percent.
These statistics require translation into human terms. Each of those numbers represents a person who had a name, a family, a place in a community. Someone who was captured, often through violence, marched to the coast, held in a dungeon, branded with hot iron, chained in a ship's hold for weeks, and—if they survived—sold at auction to work on a plantation until they died.
The Investors Knew Exactly What They Were Financing
It would be convenient to imagine that the English investors who financed the Royal African Company were somehow ignorant of what their money was doing. Perhaps they thought of themselves as backing a gold-mining venture, or a general trading enterprise.
They did not. As historian William Pettigrew has documented, the investors were fully aware of the company's activities and intended to profit from the exploitation of African lives. The branding of enslaved people with the Duke of York's initials was not a secret. The slave ships returning from West Africa were visible in English ports. The sugar and tobacco flowing back from Caribbean plantations—products of enslaved labor—were openly traded in London markets.
Edward Colston is perhaps the most famous of these investors today, though not for reasons he would have wished. Colston was a Bristol merchant, a Member of Parliament, and a substantial philanthropist who funded schools, hospitals, and churches that still bear his name. He was also a shareholder in the Royal African Company from 1680 to 1692 and served as its Deputy Governor—a senior executive position—from 1689 to 1690.
In 2020, during protests following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, demonstrators in Bristol pulled down a statue of Colston and threw it into the harbor. The statue had stood since 1895. It took 125 years for the city to reckon with what its celebrated philanthropist had actually done to amass his fortune.
Competition, Warfare, and the Beginning of the End
The Royal African Company did not operate in a vacuum. The Dutch had been the dominant slave traders to the English Caribbean colonies before the Restoration, and they were not eager to surrender the business.
The result was decades of conflict along the West African coast. In 1663, Captain Holmes led an English expedition that captured or destroyed all Dutch settlements in the region. The Dutch struck back. Admiral de Ruyter recaptured everything except Cape Coast Castle and seized the English fort at Cormantin. The Treaty of Breda in 1667 confirmed Cape Coast Castle as English territory, but the fighting had devastated the Royal African Company's finances.
By 1672, the original Company of Royal Adventurers was ruined. It surrendered its charter and was replaced by the Royal African Company of England, with an even broader mandate that included the right to maintain troops and exercise martial law in West Africa.
For about fifteen years, from 1672 to 1687, the reconstituted company prospered. But success created enemies at home. English merchants who were not shareholders resented the company's monopoly. They wanted to participate in the profitable slave trade themselves. These independent traders, called "interlopers," began smuggling goods and slaves in violation of the company's exclusive charter.
The company had the legal right to seize these ships, with half the proceeds going to the crown and half to the company. But enforcement was expensive and incomplete. As the monopoly frayed, so did the company's political position.
The Glorious Revolution Changes Everything
In 1688, England's political order was upended. The Catholic King James II—the same Duke of York who had served as the Royal African Company's first governor and whose initials had been branded onto countless enslaved people—fled the country. Parliament invited the Protestant William of Orange to take the throne alongside his wife Mary (James's own daughter). This "Glorious Revolution" transformed English governance and, incidentally, the structure of the slave trade.
The Royal African Company's monopoly had been a grant from the Stuart kings. With the Stuarts gone and parliamentary power ascendant, that monopoly was politically doomed. The company acknowledged reality in 1689, ceasing to issue letters of marque—legal authorizations to seize rival traders.
In 1697, Parliament passed the Trade with Africa Act, which opened African commerce to any English merchant willing to pay a ten percent levy to the Royal African Company. The fee was meant to help maintain the coastal forts, but it also meant the end of exclusive control.
It's worth noting what this political fight was actually about. The opponents of monopoly were not humanitarians seeking to end the slave trade. They were businessmen who wanted to participate in it. The "freedom" they sought was the freedom to profit from selling human beings without paying licensing fees to the Royal African Company.
Decline, Dissolution, and the Gold That Gave Us the Guinea
The Royal African Company could not survive open competition. By 1708, it was insolvent. The company limped along for another four decades in a state of much-reduced activity, but its days as a major slaving enterprise were over. In 1731, it abandoned the slave trade entirely, focusing instead on ivory and gold dust.
There's a curious footnote to this history. From 1668 to 1722, the Royal African Company supplied gold to the English Mint. Coins minted from this African gold featured an elephant below the monarch's portrait—a decorative choice that commemorated the source of the metal. These coins became known as "guineas," a name that persisted in British currency until decimalization in 1971. The twenty-one-shilling coin that respectable Victorians used to pay their tailors and tradesmen was named for a region synonymous with the slave trade.
In 1750, Parliament passed the African Company Act, dissolving the Royal African Company and transferring its remaining assets—nine trading posts along the Gold Coast—to a new organization called the African Company of Merchants. That company lasted until 1821, by which time Britain had abolished the slave trade (in 1807) and was actively working to suppress it in other nations.
The Larger Context: Jews, Slave Trading, and Historical Revisionism
The Royal African Company surfaces in contemporary debates for a specific reason: it was an unambiguously English institution, chartered by the English crown, financed by English investors, and operated under English law. Its governors included members of the royal family. Its shareholders included sitting Members of Parliament.
This matters because some modern commentators have attempted to shift responsibility for the Atlantic slave trade onto other groups—particularly Jews. The claim that Jews "controlled" or dominated the slave trade is a conspiracy theory with a long and ugly history, revived periodically by antisemites seeking to deflect attention from the actual perpetrators.
The historical record is clear. The Atlantic slave trade was dominated by the major European colonial powers: Portugal, Spain, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and to a lesser extent Denmark and Brandenburg. Within Britain, the trade was controlled by institutions like the Royal African Company and, later, by independent merchants based in ports like Liverpool, Bristol, and London.
Were there Jewish merchants who participated in the slave trade? Yes, as there were merchants of virtually every background in the commercial centers of the Atlantic world. But the idea that Jews controlled or dominated the trade is contradicted by every serious historical study of the subject. The ships flying the British flag were not crewed by Jewish captains. The forts along the African coast were not garrisoned by Jewish soldiers. The Royal African Company was not a Jewish enterprise. It was an English one, backed by English capital, operating under English authority, and enriching English investors.
Attempts to claim otherwise are not historical arguments. They are conspiracy theories that serve to minimize the responsibility of actual perpetrators while scapegoating a convenient minority.
The Legacy We Inherit
The Royal African Company ceased to exist nearly three centuries ago, but its effects persist.
The wealth extracted from the slave trade and slave labor helped finance Britain's Industrial Revolution. The insurance companies, banks, and trading houses that handled slaving transactions evolved into institutions that still exist today. The ports that grew rich on the trade—Liverpool, Bristol, London—remain major cities. The philanthropic legacies of slave traders like Edward Colston endowed schools and hospitals that educated and healed generations of British citizens.
Meanwhile, the descendants of the people the Royal African Company transported across the Atlantic—those who survived, and whose descendants survived slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the ongoing struggles of the present—continue to live with the consequences of what was done to their ancestors.
History is not something that happened in the past. It is something that happened and keeps happening, its effects rippling forward through time. The Royal African Company, with its neat account books and its branding irons and its respectable investors, is part of the inheritance that all of us—on every side of the Atlantic—continue to carry.
Understanding that history accurately, in all its horror and all its complexity, is not about assigning guilt to the living. It's about understanding how we got here, why things are the way they are, and what responsibilities we might have to one another as a result. That understanding requires confronting the actual historical record—not sanitized versions that minimize what happened, and not conspiracy theories that redirect blame onto convenient scapegoats.
The Royal African Company was real. Its investors were real. Its profits were real. And the suffering it caused was real. That is the history, and that is what we have to work with.