Britain’s serious involvement in the Atlantic slave trade began in the mid-seventeenth century, over 200 years after Portugal established the trade and long after Spanish, Dutch, and French involvement had become significant.
The key institutional moment was the founding of the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa in 1660, later reorganised as the Royal African Company in 1672. This company, backed by the Crown and prominent merchants, was granted a monopoly on British trade with West Africa, including the slave trade. For the next few decades it dominated British slave trading, operating from fortresses on the West African coast.
The monopoly was broken in 1698, and the trade was opened to all British merchants. This liberalisation led to a rapid expansion of British slave trading, and the eighteenth century represents the peak of British involvement. Bristol and Liverpool emerged as the primary British slaving ports, and British ships became among the most numerous on the Middle Passage.
By the time Britain became a dominant force in the trade, however, it was already a mature system that had been operating for centuries. The infrastructure of West African trading forts, the commercial relationships with African suppliers, the plantation systems in the Caribbean, had all been established primarily by Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands before Britain took a leading role. Britain expanded and exploited a system it largely inherited rather than created.
