Who was the person to own the most slaves? Originally Answered: Which individual owned the most slaves in human history? An exact answer is impossible, of course, but it’s turned out to be harder than I anticipated even to find some top candidates.
Tippu Tip or Hamed bin Muhammed el Murjebi (1832–1905), the famous Zanzibari slave trader, reportedly owned about ten thousand slaves after he had retired from the trade in 1895. That would certainly make him one of the largest private slaveholders in history. But, then, he’s better documented than most because of when he lived (also, he left personal memoirs behind). Besides, do we know for certain how many slaves Tippu Tip owned? Did, perhaps, European officials and missionaries exaggerate the number because they at that time used the need to abolish slave trading and slavery as an argument for colonization? Did Tippu himself exaggerate his human wealth because he was a proud man? Hard to say. He was certainly a large slaveholder by any measure, but how high up would he be in a world-historical ranking? Then you have historic societies where the state itself was a slaveholder—the Ottoman Empire used slave soldiers, for instance. There the ruler might technically be the owner of far larger numbers of slaves, but since that ownership would be inseparable from political leadership, it’s not quite the same phenomenon. Does that count? Similarly, the Catholic Church—including its religious orders such as the Jesuits—was the largest slaveholder in the Spanish Americas in the 18th century, but it wasn’t a private organization, either, and in practice, all these people would be held as slaves by many different individuals; I doubt that the central Church organization had any clue how many people it nominally owned. It also depends a bit on what you mean by owning the most slaves. Who owned the most people at any single point or who owned the greatest number of persons over the course of years or decades, and no matter how briefly they possessed each individual? If the latter, it may be The Royal African Company, a private slave trading corporation that may have bought and sold as many at 190,000 people between 1673 and 1732. Of course, the RAC wasn’t owned and controlled by one person but by many investors. Maybe one could find out how many investors there were and how many shares they owned and sort of assign a figure to each of them, but that approach strikes me as rather synthetic. As a point of comparison, this fellow, Joshua John Ward, was the largest single slaveholder in the United States when he died in 1853: He had almost 11,00 people in his ownership. That’s a lot, but the slave trading firm Franklin & Armfield—owned by the partners Isaac Franklin and John Armfield—may have disposed of 10,000 people within the US over its decade of operations in the 1820s and 1830s. That dwarfs Ward’s slaveholding, but shouldn’t one also consider how many different individuals Ward claimed as his property over his entire career? Sent from my iPhone
