The Entrepreneurial Class Enters the Slave Trade

The crucial turning point for North America--and arguably, the British Empire as a whole--emerged in 1688 with the so-called Glorious Revolution, which, inter alia, caused the monarchy to retreat and led to the ascendancy of a rising class of merchants. This, in turn, empowered the "private" or "separate" merchants--entrepreneurs--who wished to enter into the lushly lucrative market in enslaved Africans, to the detriment of the Royal African Company.

--Gerald Horne, preface to The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (New York: New York University Press, 2016), vii-viii.