known generically as serges, had a sturdy, combed-wool warp and a soft, carded-wool weft. Their particular names varied widely based on the specifications and locality of their production. The two that were most important to the RAC were the perpetuana and the say, both of them recognized and highly valued on the Guinea Coast for being hard wearing, lightweight, and relatively cheap woolens.8
FIGURE 2.1 European floor loom and weaver. Denis Diderot, et al., Encyclopédie (Paris, 1762). Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, NC.
Supplies of these new draperies came to the RAC in London mostly from the towns and countryside of Devonshire in southwestern England, where they were made by smallholders or landless artisans, many of whom worked seasonally—either independently or under putting-out arrangements with merchants in Exeter (see map 2.1). In the putting-out system, a merchant would sell or lend raw wool to a male weaver who then arranged for it to be cleaned, prepared, and spun into yarn. Shipments of Irish wool with the long fibers requisite for spinning strong worsted thread for weaving serges came in on the northern coast of the peninsula to be carried overland to Exeter. The Irish sources of the weavers’ basic raw material thus put merchants in control of weavers’ fortunes. Wool with shorter fibers for the weft thread arrived via the coasting trade from the southeast, mainly Kent and Sussex, as well as from around the local countryside. Women and children were the ones who engaged in the primary work of preparing wool and spinning it, and skill levels, as well as wages, varied widely. Then, once a weaver wove the cloth, he sold his yardage either in the serge market or directly back to the merchant who had supplied the wool. It would then be the merchant who had the cloth finished and dyed.9
The RAC entered the process at this point. Serges came to them undyed and unfinished, and the company arranged with either an agent in Exeter or a representative in London to manage the transport of their woolen goods to London, where they contracted with specialists in the city to dye, set, press, and pack them for export. Perpetuanas were hard wearing and relatively cheap, and according to over twenty-seven years of reported figures, the company exported more than 170,000 pieces of them to the Guinea Coast. RAC officials, determined to maintain quality controls necessary to prevent spinners and weavers from pilfering wool or thread, instituted standards specifying a certain weight per measured length of woven yardage. The company exported says as well, especially during their first twenty years, when records show they shipped two thousand to three thousand pieces annually. RAC agents on the Gold Coast complained when lack of perpetuanas and says resulted in a falloff in their trade. They also faced keen competition there from the Dutch, who were adept at maintaining their own supplies of serges even into the first years of the 1700s.10
Among the RAC exports in the general category of metalwares, its second-most important category of goods, bar iron was the most significant, especially in the second half of the seventeenth century. For example, company records show that of the thirty-five vessels the company sent to Africa in 1685, twenty-nine of them carried the iron bars that supplemented the output of African smelting furnaces. During this period, at least, they did not export any English-made iron. Instead, regular supplies of bar iron came to them from importers in London who specialized in the Baltic trade and who also were shareholders in the company. Export iron circulated in trading networks as intermediate or semifinished goods, which meant that producers worked it into hammered iron bars that could later be turned into tools or other implements elsewhere, sometimes an ocean away. The RAC’s main source of iron in the seventeenth century was Sweden (see map 2.1), where ironworkers produced bar iron for export in the form of bars of standardized dimensions and weight. In the mid-1680s, the company’s contract with their supplier stipulated that the bars had to be stamped with a trade mark and weigh in at seventy-five to eighty bars per ton, or twenty-eight to thirty pounds per bar. Between 1673 and 1704, the RAC reexported well over five thousand tons of Swedish bar iron (around four hundred thousand bars) to the Guinea Coast.11
Sweden had only recently shifted production of iron toward the export trade. Previously, between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries, iron ore had been mined and smelted into iron metal in communally held blast furnaces and then processed yet further into units of workable iron for local and regional users. Agrarian households living in the ore resource areas carried out this work seasonally and on a relatively small scale. In the early seventeenth century, however, larger-scale specialized ironworks began to be set up by individuals who acted on new economic policies that were put into place by the Swedish Crown. Outside the areas of ore deposits, merchants and noblemen set about establishing privately owned estates designed to combine agricultural production with the production of bar iron for export. These new ironworking estates generated more refined and standardized iron in greater quantities than ever before. And as iron exports rose steadily during the seventeenth century, the Crown also set up a Board of Mines to monitor and regulate them.12
Although some independent peasant ironworkers continued to produce bar iron on a small scale, a majority of agrarian households produced iron for export and found themselves working under a much more rigid and restrictive division of labor. Crown regulations divided the stages of mining, smelting, and forging more sharply from one another by geography and by workforce. This scheme restricted peasant ironworkers to just the primary stages of mining and smelting the ore. Secondary manufacture, that is, refining smelted iron and forging it into bars, was far more profitable. Under the new regulations, it was carried out separately in workshops on the private estates. These were strategically located in provinces adjacent to where the ore deposits were and where the mining and smelting went on. Some of the larger estates also began to operate their forges year round.
In this new arrangement, the peasant workers came under much closer scrutiny and direct control. Royal decrees restricted access to iron ore only to those farmers who were engaged in pig-iron production for the estates, and each mining district was put on a work schedule. Labor in mining—the extracting of ore from the pit mines, sorting it and loading it into horse-drawn carts, and transporting it to the blast furnace—was shared by the farmer’s household. So, too, was the work of making the charcoal fuel used in smelting the ore. But since most of this work, including the actual smelting process, was carried out in winter, peasant households could potentially realize noticeable economic benefits in the form of either subsistence or cash by entering into contracts to supply the ironworks estates with pig iron. Over time, however, as ironmasters running the estates sought to increase production and lower costs, peasant workers came under harsher conditions and constraints. More of them found that the terms of their contracts that laid out the amount and price of the pig iron they were to produce ended up leaving them bound to an ironmaster by debt. And if they were able instead to contract with merchants who sold pig iron to the estates, indebtedness would more often be the result in that case as well. Thus, for most Swedish ironworkers, intensification of iron production for Atlantic trade was clearly not a boon, and so those who could do so retaliated by embezzling raw materials or working on their own accounts.13
Second in significance among RAC exports of metalwares was a wide variety of drinking vessels, plates, and containers made of copper, brass, or pewter. Copper- and brasswares of English manufacture were not exported at this time, and so, as with iron bars, the company relied on reexports from elsewhere, in this case mainly northern Germany via the Baltic trade (see map 2.1). Cast copper bars, an intermediate good, were one important category of these wares, as were finished copper basins that the company acquired from suppliers in Amsterdam. Containers made of brass required several stages of manufacture, beginning with the alloying of the metal, then the pressing of it into sheets, next the skilled battery work of hammering the sheets out over specially designed anvils and molds, and finally turning out the finished trade good (see figure
