"James Phipps of the Royal African Company: A Renter, not a Victim, of the Slave Trade"

As a senior staffer in the Royal African Company of England’s trading staff in West Africa throughout the 1710s, James Phipps’s job was as difficult as it was immoral. Parliament had taken away the monopoly that the Company had enjoyed over England’s transatlantic slave trade in the 1680s, and new competitors had streamed into the trade. It now fell to Phipps to come up with a strategy that would allow his bosses in the RAC to continue making money from the trade in West Africa while also making his own fortune.
Phipps’s solution skirted the ethical business practice of even his own day. He began trading independently of his employer in partnership with William Baillie, the RAC’s man in the important slave-selling port of Whydah. Sourcing European and Asian import goods from both the RAC itself and from its most formidable rival, the independent slave trader Humphry Morice, Phipps and Baillie exchanged these goods for enslaved Africans, whom they then sold back to the RAC or to slave ships from Brazil. Phipps described this as “renting the trade of Whidah,” even though he did this without the knowledge of the Company’s owners back in London, who were supposedly renting it to him.
When the Duke of Chandos bought the Royal African Company in 1720, Phipps tried but failed to adapt his trading system to the Duke’s new competitive strategy. Phipps’s consequent sacking did not make him “a victim of the African trade,” as David Henige labeled him in a 1980 article. Instead, he was one among many Europeans who hoped to enrich themselves through transatlantic human trafficking, but were defeated by its complexities.