The volume of the British slave trade dramatically increased after 1700, from some 430,000 African captives in the previous two centuries combined to 2.85 million in the eighteenth century. The key to understanding this expansion, Nicholas Radburn argues in his compelling Traders in Men, are the actions taken by slave-trading merchants in Britain, Africa, and British America. For Radburn, focusing on these little-studied merchants offers an opportunity to “reveal how and by whom the slave trade was transformed, the way that its numerous stages operated, and the experiences of its victims” (8). Over the course of the eighteenth century, merchants “devised a set of highly efficient—but incredibly brutal—methods for enslaving people, forcibly transporting them across the Atlantic and selling them in the Americas” (2–3).The growth of the British slave trade was propelled, Radburn shows, by “socially marginal” merchants who created new slaving centers in both Britain and West Africa (22). While the slave trade had previously been dominated by established London merchants, ambitious upstart traders like John Earle began outfitting voyages from rapidly transforming ports like Liverpool to “marginal African markets” where captives could be purchased at comparatively low prices (35). At the same time, coastal brokers in West Africa, including the Fante of the Gold Coast and the Aro, Efik, and Ibani of the Bight of Biafra, profited from and facilitated the expanding slave trade by transforming coastal trading centers “into efficient slaving markets while simultaneously preventing their competing neighbors from doing the same” (40).At newly established West African slaving hubs such as Anomabo, Bonny, and Old Calabar, “British and African merchants devised a brutally effective set of practices for trading people” that were designed to reduce the “chaos and friction” of the slave trade (61, 82). To minimize the risks of insurrection and mortality, for example, traders developed a sequence whereby captains would first purchase lower-priced women and children and then, as they neared departure, purchase higher-priced adults (especially men), “who then had less time to rebel or perish aboard the deadly ships” (61). Slavers also subjected captives to invasive, humiliating physical inspections, aiming to purchase people who would have the best chance of surviving the Atlantic crossing and yield the highest prices in the Americas. One result, Radburn found, is that British slave traders rejected at least a quarter of the captives offered to them—a key strategy in a commodification process that was “much more ruthless—and much more sophisticated—than historians have appreciated” (71, 89).Slave traders also developed new strategies during the eighteenth century to manage “the two key risks” involved in transporting captives across the Atlantic: mortality and resistance (91). During the seventeenth century, mortality rates on English slave ships were “catastrophic” (95). To reduce mortality, which cut into their profits, in the early eighteenth century slave traders curtailed the practice of locking captives belowdecks for the duration of the voyage (a strategy designed to prevent revolts), which they knew injured and killed many captives. Adopting “new security techniques,” including a “barricado” that divided captives from crew, long “deck chains,” a well-disciplined crew with reliable firearms, and nets around the ship's sides, allowed slave traders to keep captives on deck throughout the day while quelling insurrections, which remained common (99). When combined with other changes, such as greater quantities of food and water, the new shipboard regime reduced mortality rates from 22 percent in the seventeenth century to 16 percent between 1700 and 1788 (103). With brutal economic reasoning, slave traders rejected other reforms that might further reduce mortality, accepting “the deaths of many of their prisoners to be a regrettable reality of their business,” and instead “tried to maximize their profits by packing their vessels with enslaved people,” constructing ships so that captives could be crammed as closely together as possible (105, 106). So-called tight packing “remained a key business strategy for slave traders” until Parliament began to regulate the slave trade in 1789 (106). As a result, while mortality rates fell, high rates of disease and illness continued. Radburn concludes that “reforms to shipboard management” ultimately “increased the numbers of people who reached the Americas alive,” since “those who would have perished instead arrived in ill health” and merchants could thus still profit from their sale (124). Despite significant changes to shipboard management, the slave trade thus remained what it always had been: a business “premised on killing and maiming Africans” (93).When slave ships arrived in the Americas, another set of merchants known as “Guinea factors” connected British slave traders to colonial buyers, creating a “distribution system” that tied an “archipelago of British American slaving markets” into a cohesive network (127, 131). Typically, captains first made landfall in the eastern Caribbean, in part “to gain intelligence on American slave markets” (139). Upon arrival, captains consulted with “Guinea factors” to decide whether to sell their captives there or proceed to other colonies, such as Jamaica or South Carolina, subjecting their captives to another perilous voyage that could last from a few hours to as long as a month. Then captives endured a drawn-out sales process, averaging nearly a month long. So-called scramble sales of an hour or less were rare, Radburn argues. Sales typically proceeded in three stages, “premised on the assumption that captives could be sorted like goods and separated from each other—regardless of people's ties,” and sold to different groups of buyers (159). So-called prime slaves—healthy adults—were sold quickly to the wealthiest planters. “Elderly, sickly, and adolescent captives” were sold next, to “middling planters, town dwellers, and merchants,” followed by so-called refuse slaves—the sickest, youngest, and oldest—who were purchased by speculators who forced them “into subsidiary slave trades that were designed to extract value from their damaged bodies” (178, 186). Merchants thus developed an insidiously effective process for finding buyers for every single captive, regardless of age, sex, or physical condition.Traders in Men is an exhaustively researched, carefully argued, and clearly written exploration of a “cancerous system . . . premised on slave traders’ presumption that enslaved people were a living commodity” (3). Radburn's explication of the cruel, calculating decisions that slave traders made in search of profits has much to offer readers interested in the development of racial capitalism and the growth of Atlantic slavery. This is a sobering, often revelatory history of the transatlantic slave trade that foregrounds the many merchants at its center without losing sight of the human cost to millions of African captives.
Randy M. Browne (2024) studied this question.