How to Place Slavery into British Identity - Dr William Pettigrew
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He does so through a focus on the Royal African Company, and a detailed examination of the long-running debates over monopoly versus free trade, debates that flared up frequently from the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries.
Colonies enacted harsher slave codes lessening Whites’ fears, colonial courts upheld the chattel principle, and the supply of white indentured servants shrank which combined to raise demand for enslaved laborers. Colonists joined the call for free trade in opposition to the Company creating a broad Atlantic coalition. As a result, in 1698 Parliament opened the African trade to all comers who would pay a 10 percent duty (the “ten percent men”)
Pettigrew interprets these battles as a clash of ideologies. The pro-Company party saw a monopoly as a companion to the state, and the best way to defend the national interests in Africa and against rival states, while its opponents celebrated free trade and the idea that economic growth was best achieved by entrepreneurial merchants. Everyone agreed, however, that the slave trade was “legitimate, moral, and of national strategic importance” (p. 179).
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p267.html
A very early example of Free Trade - the slave trade...
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