The Decline of the Slave Trade
In spite of this, during the nineteenth century, Britain was to play a leading role in the abolition of the slave trade. Parliament outlawed the trade in 1807, and emancipated all slaves in British territories in 1833, though it granted slave-owners twenty million pounds in compensation (equivalent to over £1,000 million pounds today ). Britain stood out for its strict enforcement of the abolition (creating a permanent naval patrol off the West African coast to act against slave ships), and for its repeated diplomatic efforts to encourage the other major slave-trading powers to follow suit. France took action to stop its slave trade in 1815. Portugal and Spain continued to export Africans on a large scale to Brazil and Cuba until the mid-nineteenth century, but when this was brought to a halt, the Atlantic slave trade was effectively at an end.

Seen in the context of the Atlantic trade’s long history, its abolition was a remarkable change, and the question arises of how this came to happen. Above all, what factors converted Britain to such vehement anti-slavery? The obvious starting-point is the campaigns of the MP William Wilberforce and his fellow evangelical Christians from the 1780s onwards. At the level of parliamentary politics, Wilberforce was the spearhead of anti-slavery for several years, and it would be wrong to belittle his personal contribution. But this was not by any means the whole story of anti-slavery. Of vital importance was the large popular protest movement against slavery that emerged across Britain between the 1780s and 1830s, which created a series of petitions that contained hundreds of thousands of signatures. The sustained pressure from this movement had a lasting impact on the political elite, and made it impossible for the issue to be easily dismissed.

What was the basis of this movement? It reflected a new wave of popular ideas, especially a re-interpretation of the Christian duty towards the oppressed, as well as a conviction that restricting the freedom of labour was at odds with economic success. Such a wave of ideas was, in turn, enabled by the emergence of a national “public opinion”, via the growth of newspapers and other types of printed matter, and relatively high levels of literacy. In these years, British public opinion was gripped by several weighty issues (not least the reform of Parliament itself); but anti-slavery was striking for the way in which, before modern electronic communications, a mass audience became rapt in events that were thousands of miles away. In comparison with Britain, the less articulated public consciousness and popular politics of other countries help us to understand why similar anti-slavery movements were slower to emerge elsewhere.

For historians, the most controversial issue regarding the demise of the slave trade has been the degree to which economic change itself played a part. Three related questions are worth mentioning here. First, were the British slave plantations of the West Indies already in economic decline before the trade was abolished, thereby dampening the resistance of the advocates of slavery? Second, even if the West Indies were not in decline, was the nature of economic development within Britain making the home country less dependent on external trade, and thereby less determined to perpetuate its slave-based colonies? Third, if, for whatever reason, the slave colonies were becoming less important for the home economy, can it be demonstrated conclusively that such an economic trend had a discernable effect on the politics of anti-slavery within Britain? Historians are far from reaching a consensus on these matters, with some describing the abolition of the trade as complementary with economic trends, while others see the abolition as “econocide”, i.e. as a moral or political act that flew in the face of economic interests.

The end of the Atlantic slave trade was not the end of slavery itself. In the Americas slavery was outlawed by all the major states by the late 1880s (with Brazil being the last to act in 1888), but it continued in North Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean up to the 1900s, and persisted in sub-Saharan Africa during the early twentieth century. Instances of slavery still remain. The anti-slavery movement was only able to make progress in its goals over a number of generations; but, even so, it showed that, through repeated campaigns, it was possible to remould the international economy in line with moral principle.

  < previous   Page 2 of 2

Comments