Royal African Company

The Royal African Company was an English trading company chartered on December 18, 1660 as the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa and reorganized under its better-known name in 1672, founded under the House of Stuart following the Restoration of Charles II with backing from City of London merchants. Initially focused on gold from the Gambia River region of West Africa, the company pivoted to trading enslaved people alongside ivory and other goods from the Gold Coast, and between 1672 and 1731 it financed 652 voyages that transported 186,748 enslaved Africans, of whom 16,077 died en route, shipping more enslaved people to the Americas than any other single institution in the transatlantic slave trade. It lost its monopoly in 1697, became insolvent by 1708, and was formally dissolved in 1752, its remaining assets passing to the African Company of Merchants.