Jim Crist. Source analysis David Richardsons The Bristol Slave Traders: A Collective Potrait.

Synopsis of Authors argument: This is one of Richardsons many studies of the slave trade of Bristol. He is one of the foremost historians of the British Slave trade, and this is one of the most widely quoted and cited work in almost all of the current literature on the topic of the Bristol slave trade. This is one of his many volumes on the trade. This one has to do with the slavers themselves and their actions and motivations for joining the slave trade. The journal article starts with the entry of the Port of Bristol into the slave trade after the breakup of the monopoly of the RAC starting in 1698. The entry into the trade was not a jump in all at once theory as it seems to have taken about thirty years to take up a head of steam. Richardson says that Bristol was the second leading port in England until about the time of the American Revolution next to London. Richardson also talks about the individual partnerships that existed in the Bristol slave trade, and how they were different from the previous monopoly that the Royal African Company held on the trade itself. Also one of the more fascinating things that is talked about in the article is the fact that the slave trade itself was not very profitable for the slavers of Bristol. They had more profits from the things that they acquired in the places where they sold the slaves that the actual slaves themselves. This is fascinating in that you would think that the people who made the things that were sold would be more profitable that the slaves themselves. It also paints a picture of some of the individuals involved in the slave trade. Relevancy for my topic: The Journal article has a distinct section in it that describes the slave trades impact on the Bristol economy as a whole. It is important to my paper because I am talking about the greater impact on the city and port of Bristol. The city seems to have benefited very much so from the slave trade. There are a few quotes from which I will directly quote from in my paper. Including Unfortunately there is no readily-available series of statistics relating to total annual clearances from Bristol for the whole eighteenth century, but figures are available for several years between 1715 and 1787. These, together with the corresponding information about clearances of slave ships, are set out in Table 1, and show that for most of this period slavers constituted 4 to 9 percent of annual clearances at the height of Bristols involvement in the trade around 1730. According to this quote this seems to suggest that the slave trade was not as prominent in the economy as some would suggest which seems to be something of great importance to my paper topic.