Projects of Nutmeg and Indigo

Knowledge and Ignorance in a Late-Seventeenth-Century Slaving Company

Abstract

This article explores the history of projecting within the Royal African Company (RAC), the English slaving company that held the monopoly on English trade with the western coast of Africa in the late seventeenth century. It examines how the slaving company sought to extract profit through the application and collection of natural knowledge. It focuses on the company’s nutmeg and indigo projects of the 1690s as projects in which knowledge, labor, and power intertwined. Amid concerns about retaining its monopoly, RAC nutmeg and indigo projects each sought to enact large-scale environmental transformations of areas adjacent to the company’s slaving forts. The RAC’s efforts to introduce nutmeg to West Africa highlight the company’s repeated efforts to acquire African natural knowledge in order to apply it for profitable ends. Yet knowledge acquired by the company relating to West African indigo production was ignored in its plans for establishing plantations in the 1690s. Although the company’s leaders frequently emphasized that attentiveness to local knowledges was essential to its financial success, in the case of indigo it ignored the knowledge it had previously collected and instead embraced the type of large-scale restructuring of labor and environments that often characterized early modern projecting.