Joint-stock capitalism & the Atlantic commercial network: The Royal African Company, 1672--1752

As a joint-stock company established in 1672 to conduct England's trade with West Africa, including the trade in enslaved laborers, the Royal African Company played a significant role within the broader economy of Great Britain and the Atlantic World. While existing analyses of the company's history have concentrated on the competition with English independent traders to sell enslaved Africans in the West Indies, the competition to buy slaves and African commodities in West Africa was even more important to the company's success or failure. The RAC faced the task of creating an organization that could compete not only with illicit English competition, but also with small and large firms from other European nations in the West African commercial environment. This required the transmission of information on African consumer demand across several months and thousands of miles of ocean and its use in assembling cargoes from among several hundred distinct types of European, American, and Asian goods. RAC shareholders in England also had to design systems to monitor and control the behavior of their expatriate managers in Africa.;The RAC proved unable to adapt its business practices to the extreme complexity of these connected tasks, making it vulnerable to the commercial and political opposition of its independent English competitors and eventually leading to the final loss of the company's monopoly over British trade with Africa in 1712. The RAC's takeover in 1720 by a primarily aristocratic group of investors led by James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos, opened a real possibility for the company to renew itself on the basis of trade in African botanical and mineral commodities, but here again the policies of the new management group proved inadequate to their purpose.