More than 1,000 women invested in companies at heart of Britain’s slave trade

Aamna Mohdin, The Guardian

Women used profits from trafficking of enslaved Africans to secure their families’ futures, research reveals

More than 1,000 women invested in the slave trade, challenging the conventional notion that they were passive beneficiaries and largely fought for its abolition.

Researchers found women bought, sold and brokered shares in the Royal African Company, South Sea Company, and other separate ventures, and used profits from the trafficking of enslaved Africans to secure financial independence and provide for their families.

By the time the RAC, which trafficked about 150,000 enslaved people, was dissolved in 1752, women made up about 10% of shareholders.

The Register of British Slave Traders, revealed exclusively in the Guardian, shows that women from across society played an active role in financing and sustaining the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans.

Investors ranged from queens and princesses to titled nobility, merchants, shopkeepers and cowherds.

The archives include letters in which women discuss profits from “African stock”, while company records show one investor, Helen Gladman, asking the RAC to transport a young African girl from Sherbro Island, off Sierra Leone, to England to serve in her household.

Researchers found women were involved “at almost every level” of the company’s activities. They acted as brokers, supplied goods including barrels and swords traded on the Atlantic African coast, managed company property and used their familial and social networks to strengthen the company’s finances and political influence.

Lila O’Leary Chambers, a lecturer at the University of Cambridge who researched women’s involvement for the register project, said: “This research really shows that this was not just a flash in the pan.

The Guardian has more details.

Many of those people then endured the Middle Passage.

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