The Letters of William Freeman, London Merchant, 1678-1685

A rare source of information about late-seventeenth-century trans-Atlantic enterprise and London business, through the letters of a sugar planter and slave trader. The letters written by William Freeman, who had moved from the Caribbean to London to combine these pursuits with the work of a general commission merchant trading to the English West Indies, are a rare source of information about late-seventeenth-century trans-Atlantic enterprise and London business. Selections reproduced here are addressed to partners, agents, employees, correspondents and customers in Freeman’s native Leeward Islands, Africa, Madeira, Portugal, France, Ireland, Scotland and the West of England. Freeman's generation participated in the first large-scale cultivation of plantation sugar in the Caribbean Leeward Islands, and in the first sizeable introduction of African slaves into English America, and these two commodities would define the economics of the first Anglo-American empire until its demise.