The Company of Royal Adventurers of England trading with Africa was incorporated by a royal charter in January 1663. It was reconstituted by a new charter almost a decade later as the Royal African Company of England, which held a monopoly on trade to Atlantic Africa. The company’s headquarters in Africa was at Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana).
transatlantic slave trade
Historical Significance of Transatlantic Slaving
EssaysCommentThe modern world owes its origin to transatlantic slaving, otherwise known as the transatlantic slave trade. If this seems surprising, it is because the overall significance of transatlantic slaving in the creation of the Americas and the modern world more broadly is not a celebratory history. It is a history of greed, immeasurable misery, and more importantly denial. To say slavery created the modern world is to say the historical obvious. But to accept this statement is to confront its denied cruciality, to bypass the idyllic scenes of picking cotton, and to come to terms with the barbarity and systemic humiliation of millions, the societies ruined, their lost possibilities, and the psychological if not financial debt owed to the collective skilled labor force that produced the opulence “modern” people enjoy or envy.