Traders in Men is a sweeping new history that explains how merchants in Britain, Africa and the Americas collectively transformed the transatlantic slave trade into a world-changing phenomenon during the 18th century.

An extract from Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

In 1775, British radical Thomas Paine penned a devastating critique of what he called “Traders in Men”—the merchants who collectively organized the transatlantic slave trade. Focusing first on African slave traders, he termed them “desperate wretches” who were “willing to steal and enslave men by violence and murder for gain.” Turning to British merchants, he described them as people who “sacrifice Conscience, and the character of integrity” at the “golden Idol” of profit. Finally, he poured scorn on “monstrous” British Americans for holding “so many hundred thousands in slavery.” Through his condemnation of African, British, and American enslavers, Paine saw the extensiveness of the commercial networks that composed the slave trade by the late eighteenth century. As Paine wrote, merchants in myriad British cities organized slaving voyages by purchasing ships, loading them with trading cargoes sourced through complex commercial infrastructure, and dispatching them to the African coast. African brokers simultaneously marched captives to ports stretched across three thousand miles of coastline, where they sold enslaved people to arriving ships. American factors (brokers) received those ships as they dropped anchor after the Middle Passage and forced enslaved people into the plantation complex. The trade that these three groups of what Paine called “Men-Stealers” built together was, by 1775, immense. In that year alone, forty-five thousand men, women, and children were forcibly embarked on 175 British vessels in Africa. Despite the critiques of abolitionists such as Paine, the trade would grow further in the final quarter of the eighteenth century, peaking only in 1799. Across the entire eighteenth century, British slave traders shipped off 2.85 million Africans, almost half a million of whom perished on the Middle Passage. As Paine rightly noted, traders in men were responsible for the spilling of “so much innocent blood.”

That Britain’s slave trade reached such enormous proportions by the time that Paine wrote is remarkable given the smallness of the business prior to the eighteenth century. In the two hundred years before 1700, English slave traders carried 430,000 people from Africa. Britons enslaved almost as many people in the ten-year period leading up to Paine’s attack alone and shipped twice as many captives in the twenty-five years preceding the abolition of Britain’s slave trade in 1807. The pre-eighteenth-century slave trade was also geographically confined. In Britain, the business was principally organized by government-backed companies and private merchants based in London, excluding traders in “outports” (ports outside the capital). The slave trade was likewise limited in Africa, because chartered companies principally purchased people from coastal forts. Almost half of the people enslaved by Britons before 1700 were consequently taken from the dungeons of slaving forts that lined a three-hundred-mile stretch of the several-thousand-mile-long African coastline. British American markets were equally constricted: of the 329,000 people who survived the Atlantic crossing, eight out of ten were sold in Barbados or Jamaica. As a result of its geographic concentration, small groups of merchants organized the pre-eighteenth-century slave trade. Although chartered companies had thousands of shareholders, they left the bloody business of slaving to small cadres of professional employees, ship captains, fort-based agents, and American factors. The narrowness of slaving in Africa meant that a minority of coastal people located in a few key sites were likewise engaged in selling people to Britons.

This book explains how Paine’s traders in men—thousands of enslavers in Africa, Britain, and the British Americas—collectively transformed Britain’s slave trade into an Atlantic-wide system during the eighteenth century. It argues that slaving 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. The standardization and then expansion of these methods was what enabled slave traders to forcibly transport almost fifty thousand people a year by Paine’s era. The spectacular growth of the slave trade sparked by these changes transformed the British Atlantic world. In Britain, ports such as Liverpool and Bristol grew into metropolises, aided by riches flowing from the slave trade. New ports were created in Africa to service visiting British ships, in the hinterland of which were powerful slaving societies that cast a metaphorical net over millions of people. And the frontier of slavery raced through the British Americas, propelled by the forced labor of Africans brought through the expansive slave trade. The slave trade was thus the engine that drove the expansion and integration of the British Atlantic world during the eighteenth century. The rapid growth of this cancerous system was premised on slave traders’ presumption that enslaved people were a living commodity. The results for the millions of people who were pulled into the slave trade’s vortex were unimaginably terrible, as they were mercilessly separated from family and friends, packed together in the holds of fetid slave ships, and shipped into slavery on the other side of the ocean.