Mastering the Worst of Trades: England’’s Early Africa Companies and Their Traders, 1618-1672

This book investigates the Guinea Company and its members, aiming to understand the genealogy of several major changes taking place in the English Atlantic and in the Anglo-Africa trade in the seventeenth century and beyond. Little attention has been paid to the companies that preceded the Royal African Company, launched in 1672, and by presenting the Guinea Company - the earliest of England’s chartered Africa companies - and its relationship with the influential men who became its members, this book questions the inevitability of the Atlantic reality of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Through its members, the Guinea Company emerged as a purpose-built structure with the ability to weather a volatile trade undergoing fundamental change.

Julie M. Svalastog completed her PhD as researcher in the ERC funded project Fighting Monopolies, Defying Empires 1500-1750 based at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Her work there focused on the early modern English expansion.