Abolition (1750-1807)
European slave traders rarely doubted or questioned their work. They generally gave thanks to the Lord for a quick/safe/profitable passage, praying for good winds and good trade. They gave thankful prayers when safe from storms and slave rebellion. Rarely however did they imagine that their work was a godless, unchristian exercise. The Africans below decks were mere items of trade, numbered and documented in the slave logs like beasts and other items of trade: numbered but never named. The Atlantic slave system had reduced the African to an object. This was achieved not simply by the impersonal rise of an economic system, but through conscious policy: by Acts of Parliament, by colonial laws (approved in London), by common law decisions, and by the vigorous activities of British (and other European) merchants, traders, planters and working people, at all points of this notorious `triangular trade.’ (In fact it was much more geometrically complex than a mere triangle suggests). The basic point remains: few people - except the slaves – resisted the development of the Atlantic slave system, for the simple reason that it seemed to offer material well-being to all concerned (except the slaves). Few worried about the morality of slavery.

That began to change in the mid-18th century. There had been critical objections from churchmen in the pioneering days of Iberian slavery, but in time they had been silenced by the clamour of profitable trade. Quakers raised the first effective objections in the late 17th century, and American Quakers based in Philadelphia, became more persistently critical from the mid-18th century onwards. Their religious objections were joined by an expanding chorus of moral and practical criticisms which flowed from Enlightenment writers in France and Scotland at much the same time.

In England, the complex legal issues raised by holding slaves in England itself, and the campaign led by Granville Sharp against slavery in England, coincided with the rise of a new sensibility in the late 18th century. This feeling focused on the obvious human outrages of slavery and, above all, of the slave trade. Arguments about American Independence (and the role of slavery in North America) in 1776-1783 also drew political attention to the issue of slavery.

In 1787 a small London group (Quaker dominated) and lobbied by Africans in London, met to campaign against the slave trade. Thereafter the abolition movement was led in Parliament by William Wilberforce and in the country at large by Thomas Clarkson, under the banner 'Am I not a man and a brother?' They proved amazingly successful, throughout the country and among all social groups. Abolitionist pamphlets and petitions gave public voice to universal abolitionist sentiment. Abolition was also reinforced by the ideas of 1789 (the Rights of Man). But the slave revolt in Haiti, and the fear it provoked, delayed the cause. After a number of close calls, Parliaments finally abolished the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 (the Americans did so the year after.)