Royal African Company Logo

1660

The logo of the Royal African Company bears the company motto, “Business is flourishing due to royal patronage and the kingdom is flourishing due to business.” The inference is clear: the RAC linked royal patronage and commercial prosperity. By the 1680s, the company's connection to the Crown enabled its control of 74% of England's share in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The company represents the British enterprise of slavery extending from Europe to western Africa to the North American colonies, where it supplied enslaved African men, women, and children to Jamestown in the Virginia colony and other colonial sites.