Delivering a virtual (Zoom) talk on June 17, 2024 as part of the Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture series at The Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies. This talk is based on parts of my second book tentatively titled “Women of the Trade.”

English men, especially those involved in the Atlantic slave trade, define much of what we know about British slavery. We can read books about the leading men of the Royal African Company, which held a monopoly on the early British slave trade. Scholars have devoted countless pages to the lives of slave ship captains, officers, and seamen. More recently, they have documented the triumphs and travails of English traders who resided on the West African coast and bartered British goods for captives there. Historians have made the English men who bought those African men, women, and children after they disembarked from slave ships in the British colonies familiar to us, too. Yet, what is not readily apparent from this scholarship, and what this paper shows, is that the business of Atlantic slave trading was dependent upon British women, too.

Drawing on personal and business correspondence, travel narratives, passenger lists, account books, newspapers, and business directories, “Women of the British Atlantic Slave Trade” shows that women participated in almost every documented aspect of Britain’s slave trade commerce. If it is true what Eric Williams said—that British slavery was fundamental to the rise of British capitalism—then women’s myriad investments in the slave trade also proved to be investments in a global economic system the likes of which the world had never seen. It is time for us to know these women.

Contact Jan Hörber at events@dependency.uni-bonn.de for registration information.