Mutiny on the Black Prince

In 1768, the British slave ship Black Prince departed the port of Bristol, bound for West Africa. It never arrived. Before reaching Old Calabar, the crew mutinied, murdering the captain and his officers. The mutineers renamed the ship Liberty, elected new officers, and set out for Brazil. By the time the ship arrived there, the crew had disintegrated into a violent mob and fired into the port city. After the Black Prince wrecked off the coast of Hispaniola, the rebels fled to outposts around the Atlantic world. An eight-year manhunt ensued. At the very moment that the American Revolution unfolded in North America, the Black Prince’s owners conducted a “shadow” revolution, mobilizing the power of the British Crown to seek
justice and restitution on their behalf. The eighteenth-century Bristol slave merchants and subsequent generations of their families accrued great fortunes from the trade and invested it in early British banks, railroads, insurance companies, industrial manufacturing, and even the Anglican Church. ‘Mutiny on the Black Prince’ narrates the way that British slavery shaped the industrializing Atlantic economy and the evolution of the modern corporate state.