Black and British: A Forgotten History, from the acclaimed historian and star of 'Celebrity Traitors'

by David Olusoga

The Royal African Company was responsible for transporting and enslaving more Africans than any other company in British history. More than any other institution it established Britain as a key player in the transatlantic slave trade, setting her on an upward trajectory that, by the eighteenth century, would enable her to become the dominant slave-trading power in Europe. Its most significant years of operation were between 1672 and the early 1720s, during which it dispatched over five hundred expeditions to Africa. Within a decade of the Royal African Company’s formation, the English share of the Atlantic trade had increased from 33 per cent to 74 per cent, mainly at the expense of the Dutch and the French.30 Over the whole of its existence the Royal African Company dispatched into slavery around a hundred and fifty thousand African men, women and children.