Slavery and charity: Tobias Rustat and the African companies, 1662-94

Abstract

The links between enslavement and charitable giving in the late seventeenth century were deep and have become newly controversial. This article considers Tobias Rustat (1608-94), a royal servant and a long-term investor in the Royal African Company and other trading companies involved in the transatlantic slave trade, who gave prolifically to English educational and religious institutions from the 1660s. It uses previously unstudied archival evidence to analyse Rustat's involvement in the trade in enslaved people alongside his charitable giving, demonstrating that both activities should be understood through his distinctive social networks. In doing so it argues for an approach to the contested legacies of slavery's connections to philanthropy that foregrounds the social, political and commercial networks of donors.