Abstract
Nicholas Radburn's Traders in Men provides an ambitious survey of the eighteenth-century British slave trade. Radburn borrows his designation of ‘traders in men’ from Thomas Paine to recount the evolving economic strategies of slave traders across Britain, Africa, and Britain's American colonies. Traders in Men argues that these traffickers precipitated a dramatic expansion of the British slave trade, and consequently of the British Atlantic world, by developing a cruel and calculated system for enslaving, trafficking and selling Africans. Radburn blends quantitative and qualitative analysis to make his point, drawing on his work with Slave Voyages as well as surviving slave narratives and papers from slave traders. 1
The broad Atlantic framing of the book is especially useful to maritime historians investigating transatlantic slavery. Radburn uses the term the ‘Long Middle Passage’ to encompass the experiences of the nearly 3 million enslaved Africans forced between land and sea as part of the British slave trade over the course of the long eighteenth century (p. 13). His approach exposes how the manoeuvrings of slave traders in Great Britain, African ports and British American colonies affected how enslaved Africans were sold in Africa, transported across the Atlantic, and sold again in the Americas. Likewise, his unique focus on merchants draws interesting economic connections across distance and time as Britain's slave trade expanded.
Radburn's collective analysis of these slave traders is divided into five chapters organized by geography. Chapter one begins in slaving ports in Africa and Britain to examine the business decisions of British and African traders seeking to break into the slave trade. A new type of trader emerged as Britain found its foothold in the slave trade in the early eighteenth century. ‘Outport’ merchants (which Radburn defines as merchants from ‘ports outside the capital’) in Britain collaborated with African merchants in smaller ports to exponentially grow the slave trade, eventually shifting the centre of the British slave trade from London to Bristol and Liverpool (p. 2). Chapter two moves to the West African coast to unpack the different ways that African and British traders approached buying and selling enslaved people. Africans sought trade goods, while the British desired to purchase primarily young and healthy enslaved men. Radburn argues that British slave traders often successfully rejected enslaved people they did not want to purchase without causing longstanding damage to their trade. He stresses that while the method of exchange that British and African traders settled upon prevented inter-merchant violence, traders built these shifting business practices on violence against enslaved people (p. 62).
Chapter three crosses the Atlantic alongside thousands of British ships that trafficked Africans to the Western Hemisphere in the eighteenth century. Radburn builds upon existing scholarship on the Middle Passage to identify how English slave traders crafted ‘a new shipboard regime’ to reduce mortality and provide fewer opportunities for resistance, giving rise to the floating dungeon (p. 92). Once ships arrived in American waters, slave traders known as ‘Guinea factors’ distributed enslaved people throughout Britain's colonies. Chapter four traces how these merchants incorporated market intelligence into their decisions of where to send newly arrived ships. Chapter five then disembarks with enslaved captives to examine the standardisation of the sales that occurred in the British Americas. Wealthy slaveholders often purchased the healthiest adults first, while poorer colonists later purchased children and enslaved people who were ill after their horrific journey across the Atlantic. A final group of enslaved Africans, often the sickliest, were then sold as ‘refuse slaves’ at auction (p. 188). Radburn traces the path of some of these enslaved Africans from auctions to imprisonment to resale and export to other colonies, contributing a deeper understanding of the slave trade in the Americas at the end of the century. An epilogue examines the impact of the Age of Revolutions on the British slave trade, finding that colonial demand for enslaved people boomed before the abolition of the trade. Radburn concludes by reflecting on the evolving public memory of merchants like Edward Colston, gesturing to the lingering inequalities wrought by these traders in men.
The capaciousness of Radburn's geography and periodisation presents several exciting launch points for future research. A historian interested in London's nearly 30 years as the heart of Britain's eighteenth-century slave trade could build on Radburn's work to trace the business and personal connections of London's slave traders, likely uncovering many of the tradespeople that Radburn highlights as the hallmark of the changing trade in the process (p. 31). Scholars could apply Radburn's framework to other European empires’ human traffickers to explore their conflicts and collaborations, especially during moments of political upheaval along the West African coast. For example, historians may explore the economic choices of slave traders in a place like early eighteenth-century Ouidah, where British, Huedan (and later Dahomeyan), Dutch, French, and Portuguese traders competed and collaborated. Future monographs might also extend chapter one's engaging discussion of relationships between West African ports and hinterland societies to uncover more information on the African slave traders operating in the interior of the continent.
Future researchers can turn to the archival treasure trove that Radburn has painstakingly curated as they build on the sturdy foundation that Traders in Men provides. Five detailed appendices track surviving letters of instruction for eighteenth-century British slave ships, account books that track British purchases of enslaved people on the African Coast, logbooks from British slave ships making the Middle Passage, newspaper advertisements for upcoming sales of enslaved people in the Americas and invoices from the sales of enslaved people in British America. Traders in Men and its catalogue of extant sources will certainly become an early stop for maritime, economic, and business historians looking to undertake research on the eighteenth-century British slave trade.