The City of London and slavery: evidence from the first dock companies, 1795–1800¹

Abstract

Through analysing the composition of the founding shareholders in the West India and London Docks, this article explores the connections between the City of London and the slave economy on the eve of the abolition of the slave trade. It establishes that over one-third of docks investors were active in slave-trading, slave-ownership, or the shipping, trading, finance, and insurance of slave produce. It argues that the slave economy was neither dominant nor marginal, but instead was fully integrated into the City's commercial and financial structure, contributing materially alongside other key sectors to the foundations of the nineteenth-century City.T he nature and extent of Britain's 'debt to slavery' remains an historical problem with immediate and understandable resonance in contemporary society.The original debate over Williams's thesis on the paramount importance of slavery to Britain's economic transformation was conducted largely in terms of industrial re-investment of profits from the slave economy. 2 More recently, Inikori sought to reassert the centrality of Atlantic slavery to the industrial revolution within a model of economic development which foregrounds the multiplier effects of overseas trade and emphasizes the commercial revolution. 3 Inikori drew on a wide range of data and sources to argue that the Atlantic slave economy accounted for the preponderance of Britain's overseas trade, and was not just one determinant but the principal determinant of economic change and of the development of the commercial and financial infrastructure of eighteenth-century Britain.Inikori's exciting work has drawn criticism for its focus on the Atlantic at the expense of other international trades and its alleged neglect of technological change, but his claims for the dominance of slave-related activity within Britain's key manufacturing and service sectors have largely been accepted. 4 These claims are dramatic, and one important form of engagement with Inikori's overall 1 This article is based on research carried out at Birkbeck under the supervision of Michael Berlin. I would also like to thank Dr Tom Wareham of the Museum in Docklands (hereafter MD) for kindly making available to me his preliminary identification of 148 of the founding subscribers to the West India Dock Company, and Emma Draper for her help with the creation of the underlying database. 2 Williams, 'Golden age'; Drescher, 'Eric Williams'; Cateau and Carrington, Capitalism and slavery; Solow and Engerman, eds., British capitalism.3 Inikori, Africans. 4 In Inikori, Behrendt, Berg, Clarence-Smith, den Heijer, Hudson, Singleton, and Zahedieh, 'Roundtable', Berg's contribution (pp. 291-300) argues for a more global view of the sourcing of resources, and Singleton (pp. 319-24) puts more emphasis on the importance of India than the Atlantic for the British cotton industry; Clarence-Smith (pp. 300-5) takes issue with the neglect of technology. pays tribute to the robustness of Inikori's data. Zahedieh (pp. 325-9) questions Inikori's identification of th...

Insuring the Transatlantic Slave Trade

“…In the same vein, Draper has also questioned Inikori's argument that slavery-related trades dominated marine insurance. He estimates, from data of the London Assurance Corporation for 1769-1770, that 15 percent of sums insured on marine insurance policies and onethird of premiums derived from African and West Indian trades at that time, levels well below those estimated by Inikori for the 1790s (Draper 2008).…”

Racialised Futures: On Risk, Race and Finance

“…35 Yet the spread of slavery interests in the building of London's docks demonstrates that "the wider slave economy permeated almost every aspect of London's commercial life." 36 What is important here is that slave trades were instructive for the development of modern insurance practices upon which financial markets would later grow. For example, the practice of defining an interest that can be insured and traded, practices which we see today in asset securitization and credit default swaps, shared qualities with the mercantile insurance of the slave trade.…”

SWEET BUSINESS: QUANTIFYING THE VALUE ADDED IN THE BRITISH COLONIAL SUGAR TRADE IN THE 18THCENTURY

“…6). A related sector was the growth of the construction industry, driven by the investments in docks in port cities such as London (Draper 2008). Nuala Zahedieh has also recently shown how buoyant colonial demand for copper — most importantly for the boiling of sugar — contributed not only to extensive growth in this industry, bringing it back from the dead, but also to much inventive activity in order to cut costs in copper production (Zahedieh 2013).…”