greater demand by mainland merchants in British North America who accepted
molasses as payment for supplying the colonial islands with lumber and provisions and subsequently established rum distilleries for profit. 47 Accordingly,
most of the 140 distilleries in North America in 1770 were in New England, the
source of barrel starves and much of the animal protein needed for the Caribbean sugar sector and its slaves. 48 The considerable surge in demand for
stills and clarifiers during this period is apparent when examining statistics on
Jamaican production. In 1730, Jamaica had 400 working plantations producing
25,000 hogsheads of sugar for export, which grew to 68,000 hogsheads by 1768. 49 This growth in the sugar islands was the result of exploitation; the
excessive use of land, labour, and capital meant that commodities were exported
at an exponential rate while industrial supplies and provisions for slaves were imported, which Swansea copperworks contributed to significantly. 50 Copper was significant for another part of the transatlantic trade, as copper and brass goods were used for the acquisition of slaves. 51 After the
withdrawal of the Royal African Company’s monopoly of trade on the Guinea
Coast in 1698, Bristol merchants began making incursions into the Bight of Biafra, whose traders had particular demands for the international market. 52 It seems
that Welsh copper and brass makers paid attention to the shifting contours of
African demand from the outset. Robert Morris, who managed the Llangyfelach
copperworks in the 1720s, made explicit reference to the African trade when he
47 Ibid., p. 26. 48 Ibid. 49 Evans, Slave Wales , p. 32. 50 Ibid. 51 Miskell and Evans, p. 26.
52 Thomas Phillips, ‘A Journal of a Voyage from England to Africa, and so forward to Barbadoes, in the years 1693, and 1694’, in A Collection of Voyages and Travels, ed. by Awnsham Churchill and John Churchill, 6 vols (London: Churchill, 1732), VI, pp. 173-229 cited in Evans, Slave Wales, p. 27; and Madge Dresser, Bristol and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (n.d.), <https://www.bristolmuseums.org.uk/stories/bristol-transatlantic-slave- trade/> [accessed 27 October 2021].
27
Made with FlippingBook HTML5