New Frontiers in the Liverpool Slave Trade: Business Networks in the Bight of Biafra and Ceded Isles

By the second half of the eighteenth century, Liverpool had emerged as Britain’s leading slaving port, a status it achieved in large part from its exploitation of new slaving markets in both Africa and the Americas. This paper will focus on the trading links Liverpool cultivated in one of these emerging markets: the “Ceded Isles” (Grenada, Tobago, St. Vincent, and Dominica). These small Caribbean islands, which had been almost virgin when Britain acquired them from the French in 1763, were transformed into some of the most productive sugar colonies in the Caribbean by the labor of nearly one-hundred thousand enslaved. Liverpool ships carried some seventy thousand of these captives to the isles, double the quantity of its nearest rivals Bristol and London. By capturing the trade to the Ceded Isles, Liverpool therefore cemented its place as the pre-eminent slaving port in the British Atlantic. This paper investigates Liverpool’s success in exploiting the Ceded Isles by focusing upon the business networks the town’s merchants cultivated in both the islands themselves, and in the Bight of Biafra—the African region from which Liverpool ships forcibly exported the majority of slaves to the Ceded Isles. It argues that Liverpool’s merchants achieved dominance in the Ceded Isles by establishing their own agents in the colonies, enabling them to control the risks inherent in new markets. It further argues that Liverpool’s shrewd fostering of links with native traders in the Bight of Biafra was an essential factor in its control of the slave trade to the Ceded Isles, and ultimately its success in the Africa trade.