Samuel Pepys, the African Companies, and the Archives of Slavery, 1660-1689

Samuel Pepys had significant professional and social connections to transatlantic slavery in the years covered by his diary and afterwards, mediated by his involvement with two English slave trading companies—the Royal African Company and the Company of Royal Adventurers trading to Africa. He also owned and sold at least two enslaved people in London in the 1670s and 1680s. This article uses previously neglected manuscript evidence to reassess Pepys’s involvement in enslavement and his status as an enslaver. It emphasizes three themes: the relationship between Pepys’s official connections to the African companies and his private ownership of enslaved people, the development of his involvement in slavery within his extensive social and professional networks, and Pepys’s own agency in curating his official and personal archives to shape and limit our knowledge of his slave ownership. In doing so, it considers how the consciously expressed professional and ethical priorities of administrators and slave-owners like Pepys shaped the complex archival traces of slavery in England and erased the experiences and voices of enslaved people.