The transatlantic slave trade

This document is a list of ships employed in the trade to Africa from Bristol in 1749. In addition to the ship names, it lists the number of enslaved people carried as cargo from both the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin as well as their attributed economic value. Collectively, this amounted to 8,560 enslaved people at a commercial value of £149,400. Across merchant ledgers, ships books, and account books, enslaved Africans were represented only in their monetary worth to British traders.

By the mid-18th century Bristol was the dominant slave trading port in Britain. Like in many ports, Bristolian merchants, investors and shipbuilders profited directly from the voyages, while tradespeople and manufacturers were part of local industries that made money refining and processing goods produced on Caribbean plantations, such as sugar, tobacco and chocolate.

On 27 September 1672, the Royal African Company were granted a royal charter by King Charles II giving it a monopoly over trade in West Africa, predominately the trade of enslaved Africans, gold, and ivory, bought with manufactured goods from Britain and Europe. The trade in enslaved Africans extended across the Atlantic to the Americas, where enslaved men, women and children were sold to traders and plantation owners for commodities such as sugar and tobacco, well-known as the triangular trade.

The Company is known to have transported more enslaved African people to the Americas than any other single institution in the history of the transatlantic trade in enslaved people. In 1700 alone, it shipped over 4,000 enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, with many losing their lives during the ‘Middle Passage’. This list of enslaved people includes 'names', 'age' and 'condition'.

From everyday acts of subversion to large-scale rebellions, resistance to slavery was a permanent feature of enslaved societies. One of the largest was the 1831 Sam Sharpe Rebellion when over 20,000 enslaved people rose up in revolt in Jamaica.

The rebellion leader Samuel Sharpe called for a campaign of passive resistance that would see the enslaved stop their work on Christmas Day until their owners paid their wages and listened to their grievances. During the rebellion, 200 enslaved were killed and a further 300 executed after the revolt was quelled.

This order from the British military commander, Major General Willoughby Cotton, addressed the ‘rebellious slaves’ who ‘have taken up arms against your Masters’ and have burnt and plundered their Houses and Buildings.’ He sought to ‘punish the guilty’, declaring that ‘all who are found with the rebels will be put to death without mercy.’

This is the register of enslaved people at Spring Garden Estate in the parish of St George, Jamaica. The owner of the plantation and the enslaved people listed was John Rock Grosett, the MP for Chippenham. 572 enslaved people are listed as working on the plantation, 264 men and 308 women. This estate was one of two plantations in St George, Jamaica, with over 500 enslaved people, though there were dozens of other plantations with smaller numbers of enslaved people working on the land.

The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 provided for a sum of £20 million to compensate slave proprietors. The Slave Compensation Commission used the registers as the basis to calculate compensation owed to enslavers when the enslaved were freed. In November 1835, John Rock Grosett was compensated £8,429 for the 483 enslaved persons who were listed on his plantation, the equivalent of over £800,000 today.