Alexander Renny

Slave-traders and West India merchants

1. Partnership of Robert Taylor and Alexander [given as Alistair at one point in the Taylor papers] Renny (pace Higman, who gives it as James Renny - James Renny was a Jamaican slave-owner who died c. 1799 and was possibly in an earlier incarnation of the partnership). Higman (and Sheridan) treat this as linked to Simon Taylor of Jamaica, and implicitly Higman assumes (correctly, LBS believes) that the Robert Taylor who partners with Renny is the same Robert Taylor of Ember Court Surrey appointed attorney of Simon Taylor in 1795 with John Taylor of the city of Glasgow.  There was also a partnership of Robert and John Taylor at Kingston trading under the firm Robert Taylor and Co. (q.v.), which dissolved before 1803. 

2. Robert Taylor and Thomas Hughan, whose partnership was either intertwined with Taylor & Renny, were slave-traders.  Robert Taylor alone appears as the owner of 3 voyages (1793-1805-1807, of which the first may conceivably refer to another Robert Taylor); in partnership with Thomas Hughan 7 (1802-1807); in partnership with Hughan and Richard Miles in 4 (1803-1806); and with Miles in one (1801).  In addition the 3 men had a single voyage (1799) with Ballantine and David Dick from London while Taylor and Hughan with Alexander Hughan and Simon Taylor had two voyages from Liverpool (1799 and 1800) with David Dick     

1. B. W. Higman, Plantation Jamaica 1750-1850: capital and control in a colonial economy (Mona, Jamaica, University of West Indies Press, 2005) pp. 145-6.

2. www.slavevoyages.org accessed 9/3/2011