Overview
- Demonstrates why the vast majority of the early independent British slave traders lacked the capital, both financial and informational, to succeed in the slave trade
- Analyses Morice's voluminous surviving papers and offers intriguing insights into his strategy
- Connects Morice’s business practices with the “commodification” of enslaved human beings on the Middle Passage
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Finance (PSHF)
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About this book
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. 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. He bears the guilt for trafficking over 25,000 enslaved Africans, and his voluminous surviving papers offer intriguing insights into how he did it.
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. 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. He died later that year, probably by suicide, and with his estate hopelessly indebted to the Bank, his family, and his ship captains. Nonetheless, his astonishing rise and fall marked a turning point in the development of the brutal transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans.
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Keywords
Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“Mitchell presents facts and conclusions … succeeds in making us think of questions for further research. I recommend this book to those who are interested in the transatlantic slave trade and in business history in general.” (Jose Rowell Corpuz, EH Net, eh.net, December, 2023)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Matthew David Mitchell is Assistant Professor of British History at Sewanee: The University of the South, USA.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Prince of Slavers
Book Subtitle: Humphry Morice and the Transformation of Britain's Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1698–1732
Authors: Matthew David Mitchell
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in the History of Finance
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33839-8
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Economics and Finance, Economics and Finance (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-33838-1Published: 05 February 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-33841-1Published: 05 February 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-33839-8Published: 04 February 2020
Series ISSN: 2662-5164
Series E-ISSN: 2662-5172
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVIII, 317
Number of Illustrations: 2 illustrations in colour
Topics: Financial History, Trade, History of Britain and Ireland