Freedom’s Debt

This is a book heavily researched in British official parliamentary and state archives which seeks to make a major intervention in ongoing scholarly and public discourses on the history and memorialisation of slavery. William Pettigrew seeks to show that, far from being distinct from the practices and justifications of the slave trade, ideologies of freedom associated with the enlightenment and the expansion of free trade were not only deeply connected to the slave trade, but in fact stoked its rapid expansion in the eighteenth century. Thus, ‘in helping to expand slavery, freedom has incurred a debt’ (p. 218). Pettigrew’s argument is, on its own terms, judicious. His book is based on an analysis of the triumphant lobbying of ‘separate traders’ for the deregulation of the transatlantic slave trade, and the consequent collapse of the Royal African Company (RAC) after the passing of a statute ensuring total deregulation of the trade in 1712. Pettigrew reveals the detailed strategies of the separate traders to ensure the defeat of the RAC. Portraying their victory as part of the spoils of the Glorious Revolution and the growing power accruing to Parliament after 1689, Pettigrew shows how the ‘separate traders’ expertly deployed the new political settlement to their advantage. Where the RAC directors had expertise of previous joint-stock companies such as the East India Company and the Levant Company, and sought to defend this model, the ‘separate traders’ were, by and large, people experienced in the Atlantic trade: they were planters who wanted direct access to Africa’s labour pool and saw the greatest profits as available through a large expansion of deregulated trade, lobbying the English provinces cleverly to advance their interests

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