Global Encounters and the Archives: Britain’s Empire in the Age of Horace Walpole

Map of Africa, 1745

This map served as the frontispiece to Charles Hayes's (1678 –1760) pamphlet in support of the Royal African Company (RAC), founded on September 27, 1672, to bring the West African and American colonial trade, including the trade in enslaved persons, more tightly under the Crown's control. Hayes, sub-governor of the RAC, worried over the possibility that the nation's rivals might monopolize this trade, and advocated for financial support of the various forts and other infrastructure upon which the RAC relied. The map marks forts controlled by the British and other European countries, and includes the names of African villages and nations with whom Europeans traded goods for enslaved persons. The map's compass points due north to Cape Coast Castle, Britain's largest slave-trading fort, and the mapmaker notes that it lies along the "Meridian of London" –tying the slave fort to the metropole. Hayes reported that Cape Coast Castle included "Repositories to lodge one thousand Negroes, and Vaults for Rum" –the latter being a product that those enslaved persons would be forced to produce in the British West Indies, if they survived the Atlantic crossing. Catalog Record

Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University Library

Anonymous

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.