Global Encounters and the Archives: Britain’s Empire in the Age of Horace Walpole
Item
A Short View of the Dispute between the Merchants of London, Bristol, and Leverpool, and the Advocates of a New Joint-Stock Company, 1750
Title
A Short View of the Dispute between the Merchants of London, Bristol, and Leverpool, and the Advocates of a New Joint-Stock Company, 1750
Description
This pamphlet cautions against a proposed larger and stronger joint-stock company, which would monopolize the trade in enslaved persons, advocating instead for both the maintenance of the current Royal African Company (RAC) and the ability of independent merchants to carry on trade. In addition to reflecting the far-from-unified British response to the transatlantic slave trade's operations, the document sheds light on the murky laws that govern it. For example, inland African traders often worked with coastal Africans to sell enslaved persons directly to independent merchants, thereby circumventing the RAC. In response, RAC officials sought to confiscate the proceeds from those sales once the vessels returned to shore. If the coastal African could not "make good the damage to the inland trader," the author explains, "he [was] liable to be sold as a slave." Catalog Record
Contributor
Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University Library
Creator
Anonymous
Relation
Pamphlet Collection (1640-1760)Horace Walpole collected hundreds of pamphlets on historical and political debates during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These cover an impressively wide variety of topics and contain several rare tracts.Extent: 120 volumesSummary: This is an indispensable collection for any scholar interested in the political culture of England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries or curious about the collection of Walpole himself. Over the course of his life, Horace Walpole collected a broad range of printed pamphlets that form an extensive collection of 120 volumes now at the Lewis Walpole Library today. Robert Nugent's Considerations upon the Reduction of the Land-Tax, Robert, Lord Clive's speech to Parliament and the anonymous pamphlet, A Short View of the Dispute between the Merchants of London, Bristol, and Liverpool, and the Advocates of a New Joint-Stock Company: Concerning the Regulation of African Trade are three items highlighted in this exhibit, but they— and the volumes in which each is bound— form only a small sample of the tracts and pamphlets available for consultation. This collection includes political and historical tracts in prose and verse dating from 1640 to 1760, many of which are rare and annotated.
