Papers presented by Matthew Mitchell since 2019
2025 Atlanta, Georgia
"James Phipps of the Royal African Company: A Renter, not a Victim, of the Slave Trade"
Matthew Mitchell, Sewanee: The University of the South
Abstract:
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.
Keywords:
imperialism
maritime
merchants
networks
slavery
2022 Mexico City
"‘Mr Morice is said to appear at the head’ The Bubble Act and an aborted joint-stock slave trading company"
Matthew Mitchell, The University of the South, Sewanee
Abstract:
In June 1720 Humphry Morice, notorious as Britain’s highest-volume trafficker of enslaved African human beings, sought additional operating capital by converting his privately-owned operation into a joint-stock company. While most of the promoters of the many speculative projects of the summer of 1720 advertised to all and sundry in London’s newspapers, Morice instead circulated word of his new project around the capital’s more exclusive social networks, both mercantile and gentry. The messages he soon received from more than 50 potential investors including soon-to-be Prime Minister Robert Walpole, showed both how they evaluated his reputation for profitable business and how they sought to present themselves as desirable backers. Like the more speculative projects of the year of the South Sea Bubble, Morice had to contend with the passage that summer of the so-called Bubble Act, which sought to ban the practice of raising capital on subscriptions, and which is today often assumed to have forbidden the establishment of joint-stock companies altogether until its repeal in 1825. Morice consulted with five of the London legal establishment’s best-known experts in trying to find loopholes in the new legislation that would allow him to carry out his foray into the capital markets. While this effort was not successful and Morice soon let his project lapse, the replies he received from his legal consultants show a variety of different strategies for how to structure a post-Bubble Act company. They also demonstrate clearly that, although it took decades for lawyers eventually to defeat the Bubble Act by creating the unincorporated business company, this process began as soon as Parliament passed it.
Keywords:
2020 Charlotte, North Carolina
"A Secret Triangle Trade: The Royal African Company Versus the Private Trading Ring of James Phipps, William Baillie, and Humphry Morice"
Matthew Mitchell, Sewanee: The University of the South
Abstract:
One of the thorniest issues facing early-modern joint-stock firms like the Royal African Company (RAC) was “private trade”; in other words, their own employees going into competition with them, using information they learned and sometimes even goods they misappropriated through their employment with the company. Allegations of private trade were among the chief reasons for the RAC’s recall in 1723 of James Phipps, its Agent-General in charge of all its West African trading operations. While previous researchers have dismissed these allegations as unfounded, and pointed to the RAC’s system of requiring bonds for their employees’ good behavior as a sign of the trading efficiency of joint-stock companies in general, two sources actually cast doubt upon both these propositions, and establish Phipps’s extensive involvement in private trade. The first of these sources is the secret letterbook of Phipps’ subordinate, William Baillie, who as RAC station chief in the West African port of Whydah organized a clandestine trade link to slave purchasers from Brazil, with the active connivance of Phipps but without the knowledge of RAC higher-ups in London. The second source is the papers of Humphry Morice, the foremost independent slave trader in London at the time and therefore the RAC’s main competitor. Morice advanced large quantities of goods to Baillie for sale to his Brazilian trade partners, and suffered heavy loss when Baillie died in deep debt to him. The information extracted from these sources establishes Phipps’s complicity, and more generally calls into question the effectiveness of the countermeasures taken by joint-stock companies against private trading.