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Richard Oswald (1705 - 6 November 1784) was a Scottish merchant, slave trader, and advisor to the British government on trade regulations and the conduct of the American War of Independence, and is best known as the British peace commissioner in Paris in 1782 who negotiated the Peace of Paris. ==Merchant== Oswald was born in Scotland in 1705 to the Reverend George Oswald of Dunnet. As a young man Oswald lived for six years in Virginia as a merchant. He then returned to England and established himself as a merchant in London for the next thirty years. While in London, he devoted a considerable amount of time to the African Slave Trade. In 1748, the firm of Alexander Grant, Richard Oswald, and Company purchased Bance Island, on the Sierra Leone River, where the Royal African Company had erected a fort. Oswald and his associates gained control of other small islands through treaties with native chiefs and established on Bance Island a trading station for factors in the trafficking of slaves.〔Stitt Robinson Jr., ''The Folly of Invading Virginia, 1781'' (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1953), 36.〕 Oswald also was instrumental in directing English businessmen to promising locales in America for growing rice and indigo. Oswald directed English planter Francis Levett, who formerly worked for the Levant Company, to promising English East Florida locations for his rice and indigo plantations, and urged East Florida Governor James Grant to make generous land grants to Levett, whom Oswald called his "worthy friend" to whom he owed "particular obligations."〔(Julianton Plantation, English Plantations in East Florida, Florida History Online )〕 Oswald's extensive network of business connections served him well in building his empire of slave-trading.〔(Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community 1735-1785, David Hancock, Cambridge University Press, 1995 )〕 Oswald was the "networker" of his day. He put together deals with players who had immaculate connections, thus assuring himself of immediate entree. In his petitions to the Board of Trade and Plantations for the settlement of Nova Scotia plantations, for instance, Oswald demonstrated his ability to put together those who were seeking profit, and who could pass muster with the King. Those he put forward for Nova Scotia, for instance, included: a former governor (Thomas Pownall); the Royal cartographer (JohnMitchell); Member of Parliament Robert Jackson; MP and Paymaster for the Marines John Tucker; and a Judge of the Marshalsea Court and cousin of adventurer Sir Michael Herries Levett Blackborne, who was himself stepbrother to Thomas Blackborne Thoroton, brother-in-law of the Marquess of Granby. This formula of connecting power-brokers was Oswald's stock-in-trade, and the key to his success.〔(Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785, David Hancock, Cambridge University Press, 1995, ISBN 0-521-62942-X, 9780521629423 )〕〔( Representations to the Lords of Trade to the King, June 5, 1764, heritage.nf.ca )〕 Oswald also had a cadre of young merchants whom he trained. Among these were John Levett, brother of planter Francis, who was in Oswald's employ as a young man. Levett (1725-1807) was born in Turkey to an English merchant father, and later settled in India, where he became a free merchant and invested in shipping, as well as becoming the Mayor of Calcutta. As a former trader in the Levant, Levett was ready to help Indian silk merchants supplant the former Mediterranean silk trade, which had fallen off. The English merchants were sensitive to the vagaries of fashion. Each year merchant Richard Oswald sent wigs to Levett in Calcutta, for instance. At the same time, Oswald associates like John Levett in Calcutta kept an eye on local trends, and adjusted their schemes to fit them. Levett, for instance, who had previously managed some German bread interests for Oswald, now planted cornfields in Bengal. And Oswald always kept his finger on the pulse of the world markets. When he needed Chinese laborers for his own estates, for instance, he approached John Levett in Calcutta, who employed Chinese laborers in his Bengal operations growing arrack for his distilleries. The relationships between the various associates in Oswald's extended trading empire grew so cozy that John Levett was corresponding with Oswald about the marble chimney-piece sculptures that his brother Francis Levett was purchasing on Oswald's behalf in Livorno, Italy, where Francis Levett was then living as an English merchant.〔(Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785, David Hancock, Cambridge University Press, 1995, ISBN 0-521-62942-X, 9780521629423 )〕 Oswald was particularly close to the Levett and Thoroton families, as well as to the Duke of Rutland.〔(Colonial Plantations and Economy in Florida, Jane G. Landers, University Press of Florida, 2000 )〕 In letters to British General and East Florida Governor James Grant, Oswald confided that at one dinner of investors in East Florida and Nova Scotia that "Oswald had been dining at the Duke's with Lord Granby, Mr. Thoroton, and others where jokes passed round the table about the many settlements that would be needed to satisfy Mr. Thoroton's nine children."〔The humor was explained by the relationships between the various families. "The central figure in the Granby- Rutland family group," according to the ''Florida Historical Quarterly'', "was Thomas Thoroton who had married an illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Rutland and served him as his principal agent. Although Thoroton received no order in council for land in East Florida, he was a member of the East Florida Society and also of the Nova Scotia Society of London as well. Thoroton was the link between the East Florida and Nova Scotia speculators, particularly after Richard Oswald and James Grant decided to give up their Nova Scotia interests and concentrate on Florida.()〕 Recent published research identifies Richard Oswald as the likely anonymous author of the encyclopedic two volume American Husbandry (London, 1775). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Richard Oswald (merchant)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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