Profitability in the Bristol-Liverpool Slave Trade

The main purpose of this short paper is to estimate the profitability of the English outport slave trade and to consider the English experience against the background of recent work on the profits achieved by Continental, notably French, Dutch and Danish, slave traders. An assessment of profits in the English trade is attempted by a brief analysis of the trading accounts of William Davenport, a prominent Liverpool slave trader during the third quarter of the 18th century. It is suggested that the average return achieved by Davenport in those years — about 10 % per annum — was probably typical of the Liverpool slave trade as a whole at that time. If this is so, Liverpool merchants at least seem to have been managing the trade relatively successfully, for recent evidence suggests that Continental traders were making markedly lower profits and even incurring losses in the second half of the 18th century. As slave traders of all nationalities faced certain common problems, this apparent discrepancy in profit margins would seem to indicate that Liverpool traders were better placed than their Continental counterpart6 to deal with some if not all of these problems.