Mark's Reviews > The Queen's Slave Trader: John Hawkyns, Elizabeth I, and the Trafficking in Human Souls

It may rankle her admirers, but the complicity of Queen Elizabeth I in the early years of the American/New World slave trade is pretty well documented here. As an investor in the voyages of John Hawkyns, she profited early and measurably by England's first ventures into the trade in human beings as commodities. The comedy of this (if you can find anything really funny about it) is seen, in some regard in the manner in which Hawkins was able to force himself and his goods upon Spanish New world settlements. an predictable pattern emerged: Hawkins would come to a port,the Spaniards would fall back on the fact that their king had forbid them from trading (at all) with the English, Hawkins would threaten force and violence- perhaps burning a mangy hut or two for emphasis, and then the residents and he would settle down to a week of amicable feasting, provisioning, and... slave trading. While England were early-in and early-out of the dealing in fellow human beings as captives-for-life, this book shows that so far as profits were concerned, the Empire's wealth was literally built on the backs of the captured African and Indian.