syllabus dot points tested (amended)

Students investigate:
● the historical context, including: context is given
– an overview of Western imperial and economic expansion in both Africa and America
● the nature of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, including: – the motivations for the trading in
enslaved peoples
– the experiences and treatment of slaves in Africa compared to the ‘New World’
– the role of the plantation owners in the slave trade
– the economic, social and political impacts of the trading of slaves on Africa and the Western
imperial powers
– anti-slavery campaigns that led to the abolition of the slave trade
– the legacy of the slave trade
● a relevant historical debate or issue, for example: – the number of slaves that were traded

Textbook Questions in order:

Origin of the slave trade

-​ The Portuguese and Spanish were the first of the European powers in the 15th century to
acquire slaves from the western coast of Africa and transport them across the Atlantic
back to Europe. Historian Hugh Thomas suggests that the Portuguese were likely the
instigators of this trade.

-​ As other countries gradually became involved, seeing an opportunity to advance their

power, by the 1700s there was extensive trade in slaves. The Western coast, colonised by
European nations for slave ports became known as the “slave coast.”

-​ Imperialism played a major role in the origin of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Between
the 15th and 19th centuries, the most powerful European empires competed with one
another through warfare and establishing colonies outside of Europe. These colonies
served not only to gain land but also to act as centres of trade and symbols of nations’
influence and status. Another imperialist motive lay in the expansion of the military,
particularly the navy, which countries like Britain relied heavily on to protect their
colonies.

-​ Portugal began a race for exploration and trade routes initially based on the desire to
secure Atlantic shipping routes and sea routes to Asia to exploit the lucrative spice trade.
Portuguese explorers such as Bartholomew Diaz and Vasco de Gama provided the means
to establish colonies along the slave coast that would serve as the bases for the export of
 slaves and other goods. The Spanish also began to build their empire in the “New World”,
providing another meeting point in the ‘trading triangle.’

-​ The Portuguese and Spanish were not alone in their desires to exploit the African coast
and the New World. By the mid-17th century, the Dutch and Danes joined in, trading
various commodities along the same trade routes. The first English slave trader- John
Hawkins- entered the market in 1563 around the same time as the first French slave
charters.

The Motivations for Trading in Enslaved Peoples

New world Motivations

European colonisation of the Americas required a cheap, dedicated labour force to build the
colony and harvest cash crops. The Europeans initially tried to enslave the native American
Indians, however, this failed for two reasons. Firstly, an estimated 80 - 95% of native Americans
were decimated by European-introduced diseases like smallpox and measles. Secondly, those
who survived fled or rebelled.
The Europeans also tried to rely on indentured European serfs, however, they were ill-suited to
the climate and too few to serve as a viable labour force.
The logical solution was to turn to Africans, as they were much cheaper than serfs, more suited
to the rigours of hard labour and the humid conditions and resistant to many European diseases.
Europeans could not send armies to conquer Africans, as their kingdoms and societies were too
powerful and complex for a head-on invasion. African slavery existed for long before European
arrival and the local chiefs and kings were easy to trade with for slaves. European traders often
sold ammunition, guns, brass and commodities to buy slaves captured in tribal warfare by
militarist tribes.

Along with imperialism (expansionist motivation for influence and status that demanded a labour
force), there were more personal motivations behind the slave trade. Individuals could become
wealthy through the slave trade itself and the trade of commodities produced by slaves. As the
European powers became involved in various industries in the New World, there developed a
need for reliable labour. More importantly, in terms of the use of this labour force, it was
cost-efficient and could be controlled easily.

The obvious motivation for a great amount of the slave trade was profit. This makes sense
because there were many European countries involved and competing for control of the market.
Britain benefited from sugar cane in the Caribbean and tobacco plantations in the Americas.
Spain enriched itself in South and Central America with plantations of sugar, vanilla, tobacco
and cotton.

Historian James Walvin explains that many small-scale investors benefited as well as the
nobility. He states that historians tended to only focus on the stately property of the upper class
made by slave labour. “We know of a slave voyage funded by all sorts of people such as
“widows, shopkeepers with a few pounds to speculate.”

Use of slave labour in the Americas:

Once land had been cleared, the production of cash crops required large numbers of slaves to
work the sometimes vast plantations that were growing crops such as tobacco, sugar, and cotton.
The latter is commonly associated with the Southern states of America. In South America, slaves
were also used extensively in mining, especially to exploit America’s gold resources. Therefore,
the slave trade economically grew from a strong demand for labour in the Americas, driven by
consumers of plantation produce and precious metals.

Religious motivations

The Hamitic Myth or hamitic hypothesis

The Hamitic Myth was a justification by divine decree for colonial violence and slavery claimed
by European and American Christian powers. The Hamitic myth was a primary tool of
propaganda in early America that condemned black people to chattel slavery.

Historian Katharine Gerbner’s book Christian Slavery traces the transition to religious
motivations from an ideology of “protestant supremacy,” in which “protestant planters claimed
Christian identity for themselves while denying it to Africans and Indians.”

Arguing that “historians have overstated the significance of emotive worship for the appeal of
Christianity” to the enslaved, she emphasizes “the powerful draw of literacy … associated with
Protestant conversion” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

Katharine attributes the religious motivation for slavery to a varied protestant interpretation of the
bible. (Catholics hardly read the bible; they followed the teachings of the church).
Historians and abolitionists in particular debate whether the slave trade fostered this constant warfare or if it existed
beforehand. Abolitionists debate that the slave trade stimulated warfare, corrupted laws, stifled technological
development, depopulated Africa and created an elite class of rulers and traders. Some argue that the slave trade was
the beginning of a dependency relationship with Europe, as African kingdoms exchanged their most valuable primary
products for European manufactured goods.

African Slavery

Slaves gathered in Africa: The institution of slavery existed in Africa centuries before European
arrival, with slavery being used as a form of punishment and a cheap source of labour. Europeans
were able to purchase slaves who had been gathered by African traders and brought to
designated ports along the coast to be transported across the middle passage. Private land
ownership was largely absent from precolonial African societies, and slaves were one of the few
forms of wealth-producing property an individual could possess.

Constant warfare amongst rival tribes saw opportunities for European traders to capitalize on
their need for guns, ammunition and goods. In exchange for these goods or money, tribes were
willing to give up numerous prisoners of war. Some historians suggest that the lucrative slave
trade resulted in a new mentality to warfare; maximising the number of captives to be sold as
slaves. The traders found all conceivable means to foster warfare, as Africans were usually only
willing to sell prisoners of war. The enticement of European goods- especially guns and
ammunition- also eventually resulted in kidnapping gangs raiding neighbourhoods. Those caught
or taken prisoner had to be marched to the coast to await purchase.

Marika Sherwood- The Slave Coast came to be dotted with European forts, their massive guns
facing out to sea to “warn off rival European traders.” Each castle incorporated prisons or
‘barracoons’ in which the enslaved women, children and men were kept, awaiting purchase by
the traders, who could only initially reach the coast at those times of the year when the winds
blew in the right direction. The prisons- without sanitation, with little air- must have been
hell-holes in the humid coastal climate. The death rates are not known. (cause of discrepancy in
the recorded number of slaves transported from Africa to Europe? Do some historians not
account for slaves who died before transport while in the barracoons?)

The Nature of the Slave Trade- accounts for some economic impacts

Triangular Trade
Taking the western coast of Africa as a starting point, triangular trade entailed the transport of
slaves across the Atlantic to the Americas to owners who would then use them for the production
of goods such as cotton, sugar cane and molasses. The raw materials would be transported back
to Europe and manufactured.

The Middle Passage

The middle passage referred to the transport of slaves from Africa to the ‘New World’ in the
Americas. The middle passage was notorious for its brutality, overcrowdedness, unsanitary
conditions and the shock of Africans being kidnapped and taken without knowledge of their
fate. It was also the longest voyage of the trading triangle routes.

The outward passage referred to the travel of Europeans to Africa in order to buy slaves or
capture Africans to be sold as slaves. European goods like Guns, ammunition, rum, metal tools
and cloth were exchanged or sold to buy slaves from militaristic African tribes such as the
kingdom of Dahomey.

The return passage was the transport of raw materials produced by slaves in the Americas to
Europe, where they would be processed for manufacturing. These manufactured commodities
would be sold in Africa by traders on the outward passage.

The experiences and treatment of slaves in Africa compared to the ‘New World’

Sherwood- The enslaving of Africans was of long standing. Arab and then Muslim slave traders
had been sailing Africans across the Red Sea and then the Indian Ocean from the 6th century
AD. The women taken were used as domestic labour and as concubines in the harems of the rich.
The men were also domestics, but most were used in the military. The Arab use of African slaves
was similar to the Romans’, who also captured African men from warfare and integrated them
into Roman society and the army. Slaves in Africa under Arab societies were allowed to
intermarry and the resulting children were not slaves.

Slavery in Muslim societies was not racial- the Turks enslaved the Hungarians while they ruled
Hungary from the 16th century. Evidence of religious motivations was the simultaneous slave
raiding and slave trading by African Muslims and Arabs for export to the north and the east.
There was also an export of East Africans to India and the intermediate islands. The conditions
of slavery in India were similar to those in the Muslim world, more akin to serfdom in medieval
Europe than to the conditions imposed upon enslaved Africans in the Americas (harsh physical
labour and abuse, dehumanization, no dignity given).
Far from a matter of preference or variety, their meals were dictated by the brutal realities of forced labor and
the economic priorities of their enslavers. The core of their sustenance revolved around what was cheap,
readily available, and required minimal preparation: cornbread and pork. Slaves on Southern American
plantations primarily ate pork and cornmeal, supplemented by vegetables they grew and small game they
hunted. Their diets were nutritionally inadequate, lacking essential nutrients
 Maiming, branding, whipping, iron collars, jailing, patrols, dogs, and the threat of sale all served as forms of
punishment to ensure discipline among slaves.

Former slave Olaudah Equiano states that he was treated more as a domestic servant than a slave.
He recounts that one of his masters still treated him under African custom, which granted him
some dignity and the right to eat first as the eldest. However, his account of the vastly contrasting
treatment of European and African owners should be examined carefully, as he was a key figure
in the slavery abolitionist movement.

The Africans were not seen as non-human objects, had rights and could rise in the ranks of the
army and Muslim society. In this sense, slaves in Africa could earn their freedom and dignity.
European slavery, however, did not grant as much humanity. Slaves in the ‘New World’, men or
women were put to work on plantations to harvest cash crops in humid, dirty conditions with
little respite. Furthermore, slaves were inhumanely punished for working too slowly, faltering in
effort or rebelling. Underperforming slaves were lashed by whips or beaten by canes. Those who
stole fled or rebelled by refusing to work properly or destroying crops sometimes had ears and
fingers cut off. An explanation for the European’s treatment of African slaves likely arose from
both racial, societal and economic factors.

The Role of the Plantation Owners in the Slave Trade

The substantial amount of money that was involved in industries such as cotton production led to
the growth of an economically and politically powerful and privileged class of owners. One such
example is Colonel JJ Ward of Georgetown, South Carolina, who is said to have owned over
1000 slaves. Plantation owners fueled the transatlantic slave trade by creating a high demand for
enslaved Africans to work on cash crop plantations. Many built vast estates and became
politically influential, using their wealth to shape laws in their favour. Plantation owners
enforced harsh slave codes (laws aimed to limit slaves’ autonomy) and brutal punishments to
control enslaved workers. They resisted abolitionist movements and used their economic and
political power to defend slavery.

Some plantation owners directly invested in slave ships or participated in financing voyages that
transported enslaved Africans. Slave charter companies were established for the sole purpose of
trade and had the backing of their government or wealthy financiers (nobility like lords and
supreme justices) as well as a ‘charter.’ These charters were written grants by the legislative
power of a country that gave trading companies the authority to trade (provided they paid taxes
to the government of course). An example is the Royal African Company chartered by England’s
King Charles II in 1672. This charter company was established to combat the Dutch dominance
of Western African slaving ports, and had a monopoly of the British trade. (Evidence of British
Mercantilism and intense competition between European powers in the trade market).
Plantation owners often justified slavery through racist ideologies, claiming that Africans were
"naturally suited" for labour. Many used religion, pseudoscience, and economic arguments to
defend slavery and maintain social hierarchies.

The Political, Social and Economic Impact of the trading of slaves on Africa and the
Western Imperial Powers

Africa

The removal of millions of able-bodied African men affected the social, political and economic
character of the African nations. Historian Babacar M’baye, for example, observed that “ the
disruption of Africa’s political structures and socio-economic potentials was part of Africa’s
technological progress caused by the slave trade. Politically, African nations were affected by
their dealings with the European powers as their government structures were altered. From a
political institution's perspective, authors have found that areas with relatively higher slave
export intensity had higher levels of political fractionalization after the slave trade ended. There
is an argument, therefore, that, villages and towns tend to form more political groups in response
to political friction. Such political groups serve to protect their members and take advantage of
members of other groups.

Socially, there was also the introduction of Christianity, to which some- including African
monarchs- chose to convert. Contrary to popular belief, the conversion of slaves to Christianity
was not a simple process that was forced upon them by their white masters. Slaves had agency in
their religious choices and actively participated in the development of their religious practices.

As the demand for slaves increased with European colonial expansion in the New World, rising
prices made the slave trade increasingly lucrative. African states eager to augment their
treasuries in some instances even manipulated their judicial systems, condemning any
incriminated individuals and their families to slavery. Slave exports were responsible for the
emergence of several large and powerful kingdoms that relied on a militaristic culture of constant
warfare to generate the great numbers of human captives required for trade with the Europeans.
The Yoruba kingdom of Oyo on the Guinea coast expanded rapidly in the 18th century as a result
of its formidable army aided by advanced iron technology. The aggressive pursuit of slaves
 through warfare led to the ascent of the kingdom of Dahomey, in what is now the Republic of
Benin.

Slaves and Owners- Dynamics

The relationship between African slaves and their Euro-American owners was a complex one.
On the surface, the power seemed to be solely wielded by the master and as such, the slave
would fearfully obey. However, as the slave trade blossomed, the population of African slaves
began to outnumber the Europeans on the plantations, causing distrust among owners.
Additionally, there was a lingering fear of rebellion, as racial attitudes heightened the divide
between masters and slaves.

To maintain control over large slave populations, government policies were put in place in some
states to prevent slaves from developing skills that might encourage their independence. In 1740,
for example, the government of South Carolina passed a law that prohibited slave owners from
teaching their slaves to read or write.

As the slave trade progressed and more Africans were brought to America, slave owners began
to see the benefits of converting slaves to Christianity. Enslaved people were often forced to
attend church services and listen to sermons that emphasized obedience and submission. In many
cases, slave owners used Christianity to reinforce the idea that slaves were inferior and that it
was their duty to obey their masters.

Despite the oppressive nature of slave owners’ use of Christianity, many enslaved people found
hope and strength in the religion. They adapted Christian teachings to their own experiences and
used them to form tight-knit communities and support systems.

At the same time, competing European countries like Spain and Britain attempted to stir
rebellion within plantations. In 1693, King Charles II of Spain issued a royal decree granting
freedom to enslaved people who escaped from English colonies and reached Spanish Florida,
provided they converted to Catholicism and swore loyalty to the Spanish Crown. This policy was
part of Spain's strategy to weaken British influence and bolster its population in Florida.

Economic Impact and Legacy

Mercantilism is an economic theory where the government seeks to regulate the economy and trade in order to
promote domestic industry. It is associated with policies which restrict imports, increase stocks of gold and protect
domestic industries. The goal of mercantilism is to increase the supply of a state's gold and silver with exports rather
than to deplete it through imports, and to support domestic employment.
 seaport cities benefited the most, as they could trade slaves and manufactured
goods easily.
The economic impact of the slave trade was not only linked to the profit made by individual
slave owners but also to the evolution of various industries and colonies. For example, the
development of the tobacco industry in the British colony of Virginia contributed to the growth
of that colony and fed the profits of the growing empire. Another significant example is the
mining industry that developed in Brazil.
must connect slave trade to triangular trade when discussing eco

According to Williams, the slave trade was the foundation of the infamous “triangular trade” that
was the engine of the entire mercantilist system – British manufacturers went to Africa to
purchase slaves, laves went to the New World to produce raw materials and these raw materials
were then transported back to Britain to fuel its growing commercial and industrial sector.
Williams makes the case that it was this triangular trade was the engine that drove the British
economy and, in turn, created modern capitalism.
sugar refinery and cotton manufacturing
Shipping, shipbuilding, and the growth of British seaport cities such as Bristol and Liverpool
were all tied directly to the triangular trade and, by extension, the slave trade. Much of the profits
accumulated through this process were reinvested into the British economy. These profits went
into banking, insurance and as industrialization grew, heavy industry. The vast increases in
production achieved through new industries put vast pressure on the colonial mercantilist system
(overproduction required more markets other than Britain to absorb surplus goods). “English
industry,” Williams claims, “was like Gulliver, tied down by the Lilliputian restrictions of
mercantilism.” This led to smuggling and pressure to reduce trade restrictions, undermining strict
mercantilist policies.

The decline in the profitability of sugar (caused by the loss of American colonies in 1783 due to
the American Civil War that cut off trade and caused famine in the Indies) became the final nail
in the mercantilist system and new calls to open the entire British economy to principles of free
trade began to echo in the halls of Parliament. According to Williams, this was the dawn of
modern capitalism in theory and practice.

Abolition of the Slave Trade

Abolition in Britain

Europeans who were Roman Catholics often treated their slaves more humanely than those of the
Evangelical Protestant faith, perhaps especially the members of the Church of England, which
owned slaves in the West Indies. Possible reasons- 1. Protestants read the bible much more than
Catholics and made their interpretation of the bible. Since the bible had the Hamitic hypothesis
in it, Protestants were free to claim justification for slavery from divine literature. Roman
Catholics however, rarely read the bible, instead seeking guidance from the church, whose
teachings did not use biblical interpretation to suit extremist motives as much. 2. Protestants
were also the dominant Christian denomination in Britain and were resentful towards the
minority Catholics. The Catholics were in a way, oppressed and perhaps empathised with the
oppression of Africans’ rights.

In 1770, some Christians in Britain began to question the interpretation of the Bible justifying the
enslavement of black people by claiming they were barbaric savages, without laws or religions.
They began an Abolitionist campaign to convert the population to their perspective and to
influence Parliament by forming anti-slavery associations. Slavery was declared a sin. According
to some interpreters of William Wilberforce, the main abolitionist spokesperson in Parliament, it
was this fear of not going to heaven that impelled him to carry on the abolitionist struggle for
over 20 years.

Two ex-slaves, Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano published books such as diaries
emphasizing the inhumane horrors of their experience as former slaves. Olaudah Equiano sought
help from Granville Sharp when he heard about the Zong Massacre in 1781. The crew of the
British slave ship the Zong, facing a shortage of water, threw overboard most of their ‘cargo’. In
1787, Abolitionist figures Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp established the Society for
Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

Former slaves used literature to spread awareness of the injustice of slavery. Frederick Douglass
was a prime example of a former slave who wrote books detailing his experiences as a slave,
gaining recognition for the abolitionist movement with his literature. Olaudah Equiano, or known
for most of his life as Gustavus Vassa (slaves were often given European names of famous
people or explorers as jokes) is most known for his memoir The Interesting Narrative of the Life
of Olaudah Equiano. His autobiography emphasized the traumatic experiences slaves faced,
acting as an emotive piece of anti-slavery propaganda. William Cowper, a WHITE abolitionist,
chose to express his criticism of slavery with his poem “The Negroes’ Complaint”.

William Wilberforce- William Wilberforce was a British politician, philanthropist and a leader of
the slavery abolitionist movement who saw slavery as being against Christian teachings. In
1787, he came into contact with Thomas Clarkson and a group of activists against the
transatlantic slave trade, including Granville Sharp, Hannah More and Charles Middleton. They
persuaded Wilberforce to take on the cause of abolition and head the parliamentary campaign
against the slave trade. The Quakers (People belonging to the Religious Society of Friends),
recognised the need for parliamentary influence to abolish slavery and urged Clarkson to secure
a commitment from Wilberforce to bring forward a case in the House of Commons.

As noted by Sherwood, it is interesting to note that in colonial North America and the Caribbean,
the Quakers were once slave owners and importers of slave-grown produce. The Quakers
recognised that the slave trade was a leading issue that would cause divisiveness within their

The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed in 1787 and succeeded in banning the
slave trade in 1807. It focused on education, moral instruction and employment for the freed slaves.
religious communities. The first step for those arguing against slavery was to therefore eliminate
slave-owning within the Quaker community. In 1776, Quakers were banned from owning slaves
in the yearly meetings. In Britain, the focus of attention was much more on the transatlantic
slave trade, and the goal was to eliminate Quaker involvement in this, as ship owners or
investors.
-​ Note points for motivations: morality evolves within religious groups, leading to a
gradual shift in doctrine. This was caused by internal dissent- quakers within their
community began to publicly challenge slavery. Main argument- If quakers truly believed
in the “inner light” (divine presence like a manifestation of god ) in all people, they
couldn’t justify enslaving others. Public pressure also contributed.

A well-known example concerns Robert King, a prominent Quaker merchant in the West Indies,
who in 1763 purchased Olaudah Equiano, the famous black abolitionist, though he sold him his
freedom three years later. At one time Quaker iron-masters made chains and shackles for use in
the slave trade.

The Act making it illegal for Britons to participate in the trade of enslaved Africans was passed
by Parliament in March 1807 after 20 years of campaigning, called the Act on the Abolition of
the Slave Trade in the British Empire. CALLED THE SLAVE TRADE ACT 1807

Slave Emancipation by Britain - Marika Sherwood

Although the slave trade was abolished in 1807, existing slaves were not freed. A few Britons-
including the British Africans- were not content with abolition and campaigned for the
emancipation of slaves. Among the most forceful were the women abolitionists, who, being
denied a voice by a patriarchal society, formed organisations and went door-knocking, asking
people to stop buying slave-grown products such as sugar and tobacco. The most outspoken was
probably Elizabeth Heyrick who believed in immediate emancipation as opposed to the men,
who supported gradual freedom.
OR SLAVERY ABOLITION ACT OF 1833
The struggle for emancipation was won when Parliament passed the Emancipation Act of 1833.
As the movement for emancipation was mostly commandeered by men, it was for gradual
emancipation. However, protests, often violent in the West Indies led to freedom in 1838. The
slave owners were paid 20 million (about 1 billion today) in compensation. Most slave owners
were wealthy, influential figures in the upper class who benefited richly from owning slaves,
who likely only agreed to immediate emancipation with hefty compensation. An example of this
was the inconsistent rulings of Chief Justices and the loose wording that allowed loopholes in the
law. Chief Justice Lord Mansfield in 1772 in the case of James Somerset, merely stated that
Africans could not be exported from the UK to the West Indies as slaves. Slave traders found a
way around this by transporting slaves through France, as slavery was not abolished there yet.
The Mansfield Decision 1772 criminalized/made illegal existing slavery in England and importation of slaves
into Britian illegal, freeing 15000 slaves in England. Granville sharp managed to prove that slavery had no legal
precedential basis in England.
The 1833 Emancipation Act or the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 abolished slavery in most British
colonies, freeing over 800,000 slaves in
the Carribean and South Africa and a small number in Canada.
 GRADUAL EMANCIPATION ACT NAMED THE 1833 EMANCIPATION ACT OR 1833 SLAVERY ABOLITION
ACT
This Emancipation Act only freed slaves in the West Indies, Cape Town, Mauritius and Canada.
Slavery continued in the rest of the British Empire.

The United States of America

The United States ended the importation of slaves in 1808, however, the existence of slaves in
America continued to be a controversial issue. One of the many pro-slavery advocates,
Congressman John C Calhoun, described slavery as a ‘positive good’ in his speech to Congress.
His speech summated the main pro-slavery arguments. “ Never before has the black race of
Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so
improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually. I hold then, that there never has yet
existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact,
live on the labour of the other. . . .”

Pro-slavery advocates argued that Britain was so dependent on and built upon slavery that to
remove it was destabilizing. They argued the economic benefits of slavery and morally justified
slavery by claiming that society’s increased wealth made it civilized. Another argument was that
one class of society would always benefit from the labour of the other, therefore since slavery
enriched society as a whole, it was a “necessary evil.”

These opinions were increasingly challenged by the abolitionists, best represented by William
Lloyd Garrison, founder of The Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper first published in 1831.
Garrison worked with former slaves, most notably Fredrick Douglass and Harriet Tubman.

The slave system came to an end in the United States during the American civil war, 1861 - 65.
During the conflict, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863,
an executive order freeing slaves in Confederate states. With the victory of the Union over the
Confederate states in 1865, all slaves in the South were liberated.

Slavery continued in parts of South America until the late 19th century, with Brazil abolishing
the slave trade in 1888. Spain abolished slavery in its colony of Cuba in 1886 and Puerto Rico in
1873. President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1,
1863, as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war. The
Spanish Abolition proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious
states "are, and henceforward shall be free."

Historian Christopher Schmidt-Nowara:

‘In the Spanish empire, the motive force behind slavery’s dismantling was the anticolonial
insurgency in Cuba, in the Brazilian, legal measures, both national and local, that ultimately gave
away to civil disobedience were the driving forces’. The US Civil War, along with renewed
British initiative against the slave trade, forced the Spanish government to begin tinkering with

Frederick Douglass was at first inspired by The Liberator. As he commented upon in his first issue of The North
Star, Douglass felt that it was necessary for African Americans, such as himself, to speak out about their own
experiences with injustice. He claimed that those that experienced injustice were the ones that must demand
justice.[12] Soon after, Douglass began writing his own abolitionist newspaper, The North Star.
alternative economic criticisms, such as those posed by abolitionists and Enlightenment thinkers, who argued that free labor
and diversified economies could be equally — or more — profitable. Furthermore, by normalizing disease and death aboard
slave ships as "part and parcel" of business, he obscures the hidden costs of the trade, including loss of labor productivity,
costs of rebellion control, and eventual political destabilization of colonies reliant on enslaved labor. This prevents historians
from gaining a full understanding of the economic risks and inefficiencies that contemporaries were increasingly recognizing.
the colonial regime. The Spanish Abolitionist society, composed mostly of Puerto Rican and
Spanish liberals and Republicans organised in Madrid.

The Efficacy of the Acts- Marika Sherwood

As there was nothing done to enforce the Acts, slave traders continued their activities, as did
shipbuilders. Following pressure from abolitionists, the Anti-Slavery Squadron was established.
However, it initially consisted of old, semi-derelict naval vessels, unfit for coastal conditions. To
enable them to stop slavers of other nationalities, Britain entered into treaties with other slave
countries. These were also ignored and the illegal slave trade continued. An example is Britain
joining the ‘League of Nations’ Forced Labour Convention, but some authors suggest that this
was for good publicity, as most of the colonising powers have been more or less guided by the
convention and have at least taken note of the convention policies.

In India, where according to Sir Bartle Frere, there were about 9 million slaves in 1841, slavery
was not outlawed until 1868. In other British colonies, emancipation was not granted until almost
100 years after the 1833 Emancipation Act e.g. Malaya in 1915; Burma in 1926; Sierra Leone in
1927. Britons owned slave-worked mines and plantations and invested in countries that were
dependent on slave labour until the 1880s when slavery was finally outlawed in the Americas.

The role of slavery in Britain’s wealth did not diminish. Vast amounts of slave-grown tobacco
were imported from South America, and then from Cuba and Brazil. A driving factor in the
continuation of the slave trade was the British consumers’ demand for sugar and in particular,
cotton. Cotton manufacturing enriched Lancashire, including the port of Liverpool. Over 80% of
the cotton imported was slave-grown. Probably about 20% of the British labour force was
involved in the importation, manufacturing and then export of cotton cloth.

This demand for labour was met by slave-grown labour in other British colonies and
“free-grown” products (most likely advertised as free-grown but produced by slave labour). To
support the ‘legitimacy’ of this trade, Britain imported African products (supported by domestic
slavery and serfdom) such as coffee, cocoa, gold, some minerals and palm oil.
The abolition of the slave trade
The Legacy of the Slave Trade led to the emergence of legitimate trade,
where legitimate African products were
imported along with supposedly free
a)​ The creation of new societies in the Americas grown products. (Lawful trade)
b)​ The emigration of Carribeans of African descent to the South American mainland
c)​ The devastation of villages/towns/peoples in Africa through European-fostered wars
d)​ Destruction of indigenous manufacturing in Africa
e)​ Displacement of many Africans in West and East Africa during the slave trade

The Blockade of Africa began in 1808 after the United Kingdom outlawed the Atlantic slave trade, making it illegal for
British ships to transport slaves. The Royal Navy immediately established a presence off Africa to enforce the ban,
called the West Africa Squadron, also known as the Anti-Slavery squadron.
 African Farmers fled inland out of fear of being kidnapped by slave traders.
This led to poorer farming conditions and damaged the Africa's agriculture industry.

f)​ The division of Africa between the European powers at the Berlin conference in 1885
ignored previous historical boundaries, language groups, kingdoms and African heritage.
g)​ The spread of racist ideology to justify the enslavement of Africans.
h)​ The slave trade had devastating effects on Africa. Economic incentives for warlords and
tribes to engage in the slave trade promoted an atmosphere of lawlessness and violence.
Depopulation and continuing fear of captivity made economic and agricultural
development almost impossible throughout much of Western Africa.
i)​ The roles and structures of society were altered by the slave trade. Since slave traders
took the most able-bodied and useful, such as women in their childbearing years and
young men, African society was left with dependent groups such as the elderly and
disabled. These groups of people were least able to contribute to the economic health of
their societies.

j)​ The transatlantic slave trade generated great wealth for many individuals, companies, and
countries

Historian perspectives and debates

Marika Sherwood- Hungarian-born historian. Discusses British involvement in the slave

trade. (referenced many times in syllabus dot point notes, particularly when discussing
Muslim slavery of Africans, abolition, and emancipation)

Eric Williams- Former and first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Caribbean
historian, noted for his book Capitalism and Slavery.

Capitalism and Slavery Summary-

Eric Williams begins his argument for slavery and the slave trade as a foundational institution for
the early development of modern capitalism by positing that the realities of the plantation
economy in the New World- large production of staple commodities- necessitated that labour be
“commanded” and “made to work in cooperation.” Unless labour could be thus controlled, the
availability of land in the Americas could lead to colonists employing “his natural inclination to
work his own land and toil on his own account.” This was just fine for the individual colonist,
but did not work so well for the metropole whose mercantilist principles demanded that colonies
be made to work for the benefit of the imperial center.

Williams directly ties the origins of African slavery to two central arguments – first, the system
of slavery was built upon its predecessor in the indentured servitude of white Europeans. Second,
and arguably most important to the planters of the New World, African labour was cheap in
comparison to either free or indentured white labour. It was these initial economic concerns,
much more so than race, Williams argues, that initially led to the African slave trade.

Prof. David Eltis- Historian, professor emeritus- Essays, slave-voyages, wrote a book
titled The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas.

A brief overview of the trans-Atlantic slave trade

-​ Largest long-distance coerced movement of people in history

-​ Labour from Africa formed the basis of the exploitation of the gold and agricultural
resources of the export sectors of the Americas, with sugar plantations absorbing well
over two-thirds of slaves carried across the Atlantic by major European and Euro-African
powers.
-​ Question- Why were the slaves carried across the Atlantic exclusively African and why
slavery at all?

The Enslavement of Africans

-​ European expansion to the Americas was to mainly tropical and semi-tropical areas
-​ Several products that were either unknown to Europeans (like tobacco) or occupied a
luxury niche in pre-expansion European tastes (like gold or sugar), now fell within the
capacity of Europeans to produce more abundantly
-​ While Europeans could control the production of such goods, they chose not to supply
the labour that would make such output possible.
-​ Free European migrants and indentured servants never travelled across the Atlantic in
sufficient numbers to meet the labour needs of expanding plantations. Perhaps the
growing economy and industries back home required serfs to maintain.

-​ Strikingly, it was much cheaper to obtain slaves in Europe than to send a vessel to an
epidemiologically unfamiliar coast in Africa without proper harbours remote from
European political, financial and military power. Also, the voyage to the Americas
directly from Europe was comparatively much shorter than a stopover in Africa and then
travelling to America. However, since this option was never seriously considered
suggests a European inability to enslave other Europeans. Neither Africans nor
Europeans would enslave members of their societies, but in the early modern period,
Africans had a somewhat narrower conception of an insider than Europeans. It was this
difference in definitions of eligibility for enslavement that explains the dramatic rise of
the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The major cause was a dissonance in African and European
ideas of eligibility for enslavement at the roof of which lies cultural or societal norms, not
easily tied to economies.
 -​ The trans-Atlantic slave trade therefore grew from a strong demand for labour in
the Americas, driven by consumers of plantation produce and precious metals,
initially in Europe.
-​ The purposeful movement of Europeans and Africans across the Atlantic cannot
be answered without an understanding of the wind and ocean currents of the
North and South Atlantic.
●​ There are two systems of wind and ocean currents in the North and South
Atlantic that follow the pattern of giant wheels. One lies to the north of the
equator and turns clockwise, while its counterpart south of the equator
turns counterclockwise. The Northern Wheel largely shaped the Northern
European slave trade and was dominated by the English. The Southern
Wheel shaped the huge traffic to Brazil which for three centuries was an
almost exclusive preserve for the largest slave traders of all, the
Portuguese.
●​ Winds and currents thus ensured two major slave trades- the first rooted in
Europe, the second in Brazil. Winds and currents also ensured that
Africans carried to Brazil came overwhelmingly from Angola.

African Agency

-​ The merchants who traded slaves on the coast to European ship captains - for example,
the Vili traders north of the Congo or the Efik in the Bight of Biafra - and behind them
the groups that supplied the slaves, such as the Kingdom of Dahomey, the Aro network,
and further south, the Imbangala, all had strict conceptions of what made an individual
eligible for enslavement.
-​ Among such criteria were constructions of gender, definitions of criminal behaviour, and
conventions for dealing with prisoners of war. The make-up of slaves purchased on the
Atlantic coast thus reflected whom Africans were prepared to sell as much as whom
Euro-American plantation owners wanted to buy.

Empire and Slavery

-​ The English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and Danish all operated behind trade
barriers (termed mercantilistic restrictions) and produced a range of plantation produce -
sugar, rice, indigo, coffee, tobacco, alcohol, and some precious metals - though with
sugar usually the most valuable. It is extraordinary that consumers' pursuit of this limited
range of exotic consumer goods, which collectively added so little to human welfare,
could have generated for so long the horrors and misery of the Middle Passage and
plantation slavery.
 -​ In the next century - between 1750 and 1850 - every one of these empires had either
disappeared or become severely truncated. A massive shift to freer trade (no tariffs or
taxes on imports) meant that instead of six plantation empires controlled by Europe, there
were now only three plantation complexes, two of which, Brazil and the United States,
were independent, and the third, Cuba, was far wealthier and more dynamic than its
European owner. Extreme specialization now saw the United States producing most of
the world's cotton, Cuba most of the world's sugar, and Brazil with a similar dominance
in coffee. ​

The African Side of the Trade

-​ West Central Africa, the long stretch of the coast south of Cape Lopez and stretching to
Benguela, sent more slaves than any other part of Africa every quarter century except for
fifty years between 1676 and 1725. From 1751 to 1850, this region supplied nearly half
of the entire African labour force in the Americas; in the half-century after 1800, West
Central Africa sent more slaves than all of the other African regions combined.

The Middle Passage

●​ The sexes were separated, kept naked, and packed close together, and the men were
chained for long periods. No less than 26 per cent of those on board were classed as
children, a ratio that no other pre-twentieth-century migration could come close to
matching. Except for the illegal period of the trade, when conditions at times became
even worse, slave traders typically packed two slaves per ton. While a few voyages
sailing from Upper Guinea could pass to the Americas in three weeks, the average
duration from all regions of Africa was just over two months.
●​ Throughout the slave trade era, filthy conditions ensured endemic gastrointestinal
diseases and a range of epidemic pathogens that, together with periodic breakouts of
violent resistance, meant that between 12 and 13 per cent of those embarked did not
survive the voyage.

Historical Debates and other articles

Enslaved women and slavery before and after 1807

Diana Paton, Newcastle University

-​ For most women who endured it, the experience of the Atlantic slave trade was
one of being outnumbered by men. Roughly one African woman was carried
across the Atlantic for every two men. European slave traders preferred to buy
 men. The captains of slave ships were usually instructed to buy as high a
proportion of men as they could, because men could be sold for more in the
Americas.

-​ Before abolitionism, slaveholders showed little interest in women as mothers. Their

willingness to pay more for men than for women, despite the fact that any children born
to enslaved women would also be the slaveowners' property and would thus increase
their wealth, suggests that they preferred to buy new enslaved people from Africa rather
than bear the costs of raising children.

-​ Caribbean slavery had always been a deadly system. Enslaved people died young and
had few children to replace them. Although more than two million people were brought to
the British Caribbean colonies through the period of the slave trade, only around
700,000 became free in 1834. (9)
-​ As the abolition of the slave trade loomed, this demographic disaster became apparent
to planters, abolitionists and government officials. In anticipation of abolition, the 1790s
saw very high rates of slave imports: British ships brought more than 400,000 Africans
across the Atlantic in that single decade, mostly to the Caribbean. This was the peak
period of British slave trading.

-​ Despite this frenzy of slave purchasing in advance of the abolition of the slave trade,
population decline continued after 1807. Yet the labour demands made on enslaved
people did not decrease. Indeed, as the future of slavery looked uncertain, slaveowners
became increasingly concerned to extract as much labour from the enslaved people over
whom they claimed ownership while that ownership was still legally recognised. Many
estates, by this time, were severely indebted, and the need to service debt produced an
additional drive to maintain productivity from the owners' point of view.

-This was precisely the opposite of what the abolitionists had forseen. They had hoped and
expected that abolition of the trade would lead to a more balanced sex ratio, and to planters
improving the conditions under which enslaved people lived; both of these were expected to
lead to increasing populations. (13) But in fact, what seems to have happened is that the
immediate need to produce sugar for that season's market always outweighed the longer-term
self-interest of preserving the health of enslaved people. It was the logic of the system of
slavery, and not simply the cruelty of individual slaveowners, that produced the extremes of
exploitation and oppression in the Caribbean. Some of the biggest rebellions in the region's
history took place in this period – in Barbados in 1816, in Demerara (today's Guiana) in 1823
and in Jamaica in 1831 – and this may be partially explained by the ever-increasing intensity of
work demands as the population dwindled. As Emilia Viotti da Costa notes, the post-slave-trade
period 'led simultaneously to increasing oppression and growing hopes for emancipation'

Debated points

While many historians argue that the sex ratio in the slave trade resulted from the coincidence
of African traders' desire to retain women and European purchasers' desire to buy men, David
Eltis argues that Europeans were forced to buy more women than they would ideally have
chosen.

Barry William Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 72 - The enslaved population
in 1834 was smaller than the total numbers imported not because large numbers had become
free earlier (as did, in contrast, take place in Brazil and parts of Spanish America) but because
the population did not reproduce successfully.

British links and the West Indian proslavery argument

Christer Petley, Leeds Metropolitan University

Recent work has demonstrated that, from the 1770s, an increasingly coherent and
successful abolition movement drove slaveholders and their allies to adopt a similarly
univocal and organised defence of Atlantic slave systems.

They became proactive in their attacks on abolitionist ideology, developing a

thoroughgoing defence of slavery that included overtly racist arguments. In addition, the
proslavery lobby emphasised the commercial value of the slave colonies to the nation
and claimed that they had the right, as free-born subjects of the Crown, to keep their
property in human beings and to legislate for their affairs. Since there was a strong
intellectual consensus in Britain against the principle of slavery by the end of the
eighteenth century, the fact that the slave trade was not abolished until 1807 and that
slave emancipation occurred as late as the 1830s illustrates the effect of the influence,
arguments and delaying tactics of slaveholders. Part of their success in this regard was
down to their use of what Jeffrey Young has called 'the distracting imagery of
benevolent intentions' in a self-interested defence of an exploitative institution.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, British colonies in the West Indies
developed in a world 'beyond the line', where European peace treaties were
disregarded. The Caribbean was notorious as a wild frontier: the natural environment for
pirates, buccaneers and men on the make. It was the Wild West of the early modern
period. Having roamed the Caribbean as privateers and raiders, the English conquered
or settled several islands, most notably Barbados in the 1620s and Jamaica in 1655,
and these islands became the centrepiece of the British American Empire. They were
important because of the wealth they produced, and that came about to a large extent
as a result of sugar. This one crop above all others had the potential to make men rich,
and adventurous migrants left the British Isles in order to try their luck in the plantation
colonies of the West Indies.

The large sugar plantations of successful colonists covered much of the fertile land.
This, and a hostile tropical disease environment, ensured that the West Indian islands
never became colonies of extensive white settlement like those on the American
mainland. The islands offered the chance of quick riches, but they were demographic
disaster areas, and the arduous work of raising sugar cane was performed by forced
labour - by enslaved people brought across the Atlantic from West Africa. During the
eighteenth century, over five million enslaved people were forced to cross the Atlantic to
the Caribbean on the notorious Middle Passage. Many died before they arrived, and
large numbers did not survive their first few years of unforgiving labour on Caribbean
sugar estates. Yet, despite that, the black population of the region rose rapidly because
of the arrival of newly imported slaves. Enslaved Africans and their descendants made
up the largest demographic group in the region and Jamaica, as on most of the sugar
islands, they outnumbered whites by more than ten to one by the end of the eighteenth
century. Life on British Caribbean plantations was characterised by cruelty and
exploitation.

Abolitionist renditions of life in the West Indies drew upon this. As David Brion Davis has
pointed out, British abolitionist thought relied heavily on the idea that slaveholders were
a degenerate and different group of people. He notes that a 'conceptual differentiation'
emerged in the minds of the abolitionists, distinguishing a '"slave world" aberration and
a "free world" norm'. (7) David Lambert has developed this point, observing that
abolitionist thinking entailed 'the representation of West Indian slave societies as
"un-English", aberrant spaces that required metropolitan humanitarian intervention'.
For most white colonists in the West Indies, life was centred on making money by exploiting the
labour of enslaved people. At the same time, many of them attempted to replicate British
cultural milieux, partly to try to allay their fears about the transformative effects of the distance
and difference from Britain of the societies in which they lived. For example, the Jamaica
Magazine, a periodical first published in 1812 in Kingston, aimed to emulate the learned journals
of the metropole, which the founders of the Magazine claimed 'contributed to inspire a correct
and elegant literary taste'. This, they exclaimed, was 'one of the most infallible signs of the
progress of civilisation and polished manners among a people'. The Jamaica Magazine
contained excerpts from European periodicals; essays on politics, education and agriculture;
poetry; and letters from local correspondents. A correspondent to the journal hoped that
reading it would 'relieve us from those fits of languor and idleness, to which the
inhabitants of a tropical climate are too often exposed'. Some colonists in Jamaica,
therefore, worried that they risked lapsing into thoughtless inactivity and sought to
cultivate the type of interest in literature that, to them, epitomised the 'progress of
civilisation'. Promoting a reading culture was one of the ways in which sections of the slaveholding elite tried
to order their world along British lines, presenting themselves as enlightened and progressive men of culture.

Reading the rebels: currents of slave resistance in the eighteenth-century British

West Indies
Natalie Zacek, School of History and Classics, University of Manchester

One of the great frustrations inherent in the study of the experiences and emotions of enslaved
people is the almost complete lack of textual sources produced by the slaves themselves, rather
than by their owners or by anti-slavery advocates. We can learn about slaves' thoughts,
feelings, beliefs, and desires from the written productions of only of a few, highly-exceptional
individuals, such as Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass, all of whom
became literate, seized or purchased their freedom, and attracted white patrons who
encouraged and financially supported them in the writing and publication of their
autobiographies, or of prodigies such as Phillis Wheatley, whose well-educated owners were
captivated by their young slave girl's quick intellect and relieved her of her household duties in
order that she might devote herself to writing the verses which brought her—and
them—celebrity. Of the daily life of the average slave we know very little, and even if slaves had
been allowed to become literate, it is extremely unlikely that they would have committed to
paper their plans to rebel. But an examination of the legislative records of the Leeward Islands
in the decades following the alleged 1725 plot, supplemented by plantation records from those
islands, makes it clear that, whether or not slaves had plotted together to end their servitude, a
surprisingly large number did engage in individual acts of overt resistance to slavery and white
dominance. Although many of them paid with their lives for these displays of independence,
and would have known that such rebellious acts were guaranteed to result in harsh
punishment, what emerges from the generally brief and dry accounts of individual
slaves' crimes and punishments is a strong sense that both slaves and masters were
playing a high-stakes game, 'living on their nerves', and were equally and respectively
committed to resisting and to upholding the system of plantation slavery by any means
necessary.

'Slaves Who Stole Themselves'

The Leeward Islands- The British Leeward Islands are a group of islands in the
Caribbean that were established as an English colony in 1671. They were divided into
two regions in 1816: one comprising Antigua, Barbuda, and Montserrat, and the other
including Saint Christopher, Nevis, Anguilla, and the Virgin Islands.

slaves were prone to running away and to 'committing depredations' against the
plantations.

In 1723 the Assembly of Antigua passed an act for the 'better government' of the 'great
numbers of slaves' who had taken advantage of the apparent 'lenity of the laws & fled to
the mountains, whence they issued in armed bands to damage the plantations'. These
slaves who ran away were called Maroons. Maroons were escaped slaves who formed
independent groups and communities in remote or dense areas.

The ring-leaders were attainted of felony, and the Assembly announced that it would pay a reward of �3 to any
white man who killed a runaway, and �6 should he take one alive.

The islands' assemblies rewarded white residents more generously for taking runaways
alive than for killing them upon their apprehension. This divergence might initially seem
surprising; if runaways were so destructive and disruptive to the peace and prosperity of
the islands, would not killing them on sight provide an immediate solution to the
problem? But Leeward whites, like those elsewhere in the slave-based societies of the
West Indies and the American South, were keen to strike fear into slaves' hearts
through the use of exemplary punishments, such as public executions, often by burning.
Bringing a runaway back in chains, placing him in jail, trying him in court, and then
publicly executing him created a scripted drama of crime and punishment that aimed to
teach the condemned man or woman's fellow slaves that resistance was futile and
would almost certainly end in a painful death.

The legislative records of the Leeward Islands do not present the full picture of the varied ways
in which slaves continued to resist bondage, as they deal only with breaches of the island's
laws. Plantation records, however, offer a more individualised sense of the patterns of life and
labour on the estates that generated such wealth for masters and such misery for slaves.

In the summer of 1731 Joseph Herbert, the estate manager, informed Sir William that
two newly-purchased slaves, William and Daniel, had hanged themselves.

The Stapleton plantation records also show the many less dramatic ways in which
slaves rebelled against overseers, masters, and the whole system of plantation slavery.

Although slaves themselves were, in legal terms, property, they frequently undercut the
claims of their owners and other planters to the sanctity of property by stealing or
destroying their goods. In May 1723, overseer Timothy Tyrrel informed Stapleton that
'the still house by the camp is burnt down and suppos'd to be burnt on purpose, by
Wells's negroes', referring to the slaves of a neighbouring planter.

Another Stapleton slave, Pompey, 'was cut to pieces stealing corn' from a nearby
estate, and Marcellus stole a piece of pork from a neighbouring plantation. These
actions may seem rather trivial, but for slaves to leave their quarters, enter the grounds
of another estate, and make off with even small amounts of a white man's property
represented considerable risk and to masters, deserved harsh punishment.

From these examples, we can, I believe, come to a deeper understanding of the

zero-sum game that slaves and masters played, of the 'mutual mistrust at the heart of
the slave regime'. Clearly, it was with the slaveholders that the advantage lay: they
made the rules under which their bondspeople lived and died and enforced those rules
with the power both of law and of brute force. Yet these rules can be seen as stemming
not from a sense on the part of Leeward slaveowners of power and confidence, but of
striking vulnerability. As the Nevis clergyman William Smith addressed his readers, 'You
will say, that these Proceedings are very despotick; But if you consider, that we have
near Ten Blacks to one White Person, you must own them to be absolutely necessary'.

Abolishing the slave trade

James Walvin

Context

Cane sugar was transplanted from plantations in the Mediterranean to the Atlantic islands, and
later onto the islands off the African coast—Sao Thome and Principe. European markets could
not get enough sugar, mainly to mix with their new drinks, tea and coffee (both of them bitter).
The more sugar the plantations produced, the more African labourers they required.

But it was utterly transformed by events on the far side of the Atlantic. There, early efforts to
cultivate sugar using indigenous labour, failed in the teeth of the universal refusal of Indians to
bend to the imported disciplines of plantation labour (in addition to the devastation caused by
imported disease and sickness). With never enough European settlers, and faced by a
disappearing or dying indigenous labour force, pioneering settlers fell back on the labour system
already tried in Spain, Portugal, and the Atlantic islands-African slave labour. By 1600, the
booming Brazilian sugar industry had proved that sugar plantations, using African slaves, could
generate prosperity on a remarkable scale-although not for the Africans. The British were
late-comers, but (along with the French) joined in with growing enthusiasm after the acquisition
of their Caribbean islands from the 1620s onwards.

This new trading system intimately linked the peoples and economies of three continents.
European traders arrived on the African coast in vessels packed with European (and later
Asian) goods to be exchanged for Africans; colonial plantations devoured African slaves by the
boat load; and homebound ships were filled with slave-grown produce to slate the insatiable
European appetite for tropical staples. It was a highly successful agricultural-industrial system
(sugar 'factories' were the heart of the sugar plantations) which was quickly copied in other
crops and regions; tobacco in the Chesapeake, rice in Carolina, coffee at higher altitudes, and,
last of all, cotton in the south of the United States in the nineteenth century. The cultural and
economic consequences were vast. And everywhere the whole system hinged on the supply of
Africans.

The numbers of Africans involved are staggering. We have records for some 35,000
slave voyages—there may have been 40,000 in total before the Atlantic trade was
effectively ended in the 1860s. About twelve million Africans were loaded onto the slave
ships, the more than ten million survivors scattered across the Americas, largely in
Brazil and the Caribbean (North America took less than ten per cent of the total).
Revealingly, about seventy per cent of all Africans were destined, initially at least, for
the sugar colonies

This Atlantic trade in Africans was an issue in the remarkable political and strategic struggles
between European maritime powers. How best to regulate (and tax) the trade, how best to
promote it (monopoly or open trade?) to the best colonial and metropolitan advantage, and how
to dominate it and exclude rivals and interlopers? All these and more were major themes in
European economic, diplomatic, and strategic thinking between the early-sixteenth and the
mid-nineteenth centuries.

All of Europe's major maritime powers became slave traders, but the trade was dominated by
those with slave colonies in the Americas, in turn by the Portuguese, the Dutch, the English
(British), and French—all helped of course by their colonial settlers in the Americas, notably the
Brazilians and the North Americans. Slave ships acquired Africans from a vast coastal stretch,
from Senegambia south to Angola and round the Cape to Madagascar. But by the
late-eighteenth century, the apogee of the trade, the bulk of Africans were drawn from a
narrower region of coastal West Central Africa.

This transfer of Africans onto the slave ships could not have thrived as it did without the arrival
of Africans on the coast via other African traders and merchants, themselves linked to distant,
interior trades in enslaved people.

The peak years of the Atlantic trade were 1690-1807 when something like six million Africans
were transported to the Americas, almost half of them in British or British North American ships.
Of those, between one fifth and a quarter pitched their way across the Atlantic in ships from
Liverpool.

Abolition

As the trade grew, and as its economic and social ramifications multiplied, voices of
objection were few and were largely ignored; silenced or marginalized by the relentless
march of a profitable trade. Even Parliament (now famed for its Abolition Act of 1807)
had, for a century and a half, been more concerned with legislation to assist the slave
trade, to maintain the tranquillity of the slave colonies, and to encourage the growing
prosperity of the slave-based economy. Voices of religious or ethical outrage were
simply drowned out by the tumult of profitable trade.

From the moment of enslavement, through the Atlantic crossing, to the daily grind of slavery on the plantations,
slavery's victims made their objections felt. (We know for example that about ten per cent of all the slave ships
 suffered some form of revolt.) Slave traders were permanently fearful and on their guard against insurrection.
Planters too lived out their lives under the shadow of slave resistance and threat. Indeed, the violence of
everyday plantation life only makes sense when weighed against the ubiquity and depths of slave resentment.
Yet slavery survived, for centuries, and seemed immune to external criticism.

Then, within a relatively short period, this sprawling and unchallenged slave empire
(unchallenged, that is, save for the internal threats from the enslaved) began to come
apart. The first major blow was the abolition of the slave trade.

There were deep-seated intellectual anti-slavery criticisms in French and Scottish

Enlightenment writing. But British abolition had more immediate origins. First of all were
the English slave cases; that string of court cases which focussed on the legality of
slavery in England itself. From the 1760s onwards this legal challenge had, in Granville
Sharp, a resolute campaigner determined to prove the illegality of slavery in England,
and to prevent the removal of Africans back to the slave colonies against their will. The
culmination of his campaign was Lord Mansfield's decision in the Somerset case of
1772 which, though taking a narrow legal focus (that blacks could not legally be
removed from England) had the effect of undermining slavery in England. Sharpe,
personal friend to distressed Africans, and tireless campaigner on their behalf, was the
first real English hero of abolition.

The persistent rumble of enslaved misery and discontent lay behind the
violently-draconian control exercised by slave trader and planters. At times, what
happened to the enslaved was barely believable, and in the 1780s that evidence began
to circulate throughout Britain. To put it simply, the propaganda campaign unleashed by
early abolitionists was designed to shock the British people—who responded with an
extraordinary upsurge of popular opposition to slavery after 1787.

The whole movement was driven forward by the Abolition Committee, founded in 1787
by a group dominated by Quakers with a small number of Anglicans. They wanted to
end slavery, but they also appreciated the need for a practical, politically realizable goal;
the slave trade was the obvious target.
In Thomas Clarkson, the indefatigable foot soldier of the movement, abolition had a
brilliant researcher and lecturer, who toured the country endlessly, speaking to crowds
wherever he went, and accumulating persuasive data to present to Parliament. There,
Wilberforce accepted the role of political leader. (When abolition finally passed in 1807,
MPs from all corners admitted that it would never have succeeded without Wilberforce.)

Granville Sharp continued to pursue the cases of other Africans through the courts. He wanted to
establish once and for all that slavery was not part of English law. This culminated in 1772 with the case
of James Somerset. Hailed a victory, this case was widely reported in the press and highlighted the
question of slavery and British involvement in the slave trade.
After 1787 abolition was instantly popular, and on a totally unexpected scale. Petitions
rained in from across the country; tens of thousands of people, men and women, and
from all social classes, added their names to the demand for abolition. Time and again,
organizers were taken aback by the popularity of abolition sentiment. But they needed
to win over Parliament (especially a resistant Lords). When various parliamentary
committees began to hear evidence about the slave trade after 1788, the evidence,
orchestrated by Thomas Clarkson, was stunning and appalling. It became apparent to
more and more people, inside and outside Parliament, that the benefits spawned by the
slave trade came at an outrageous price—suffering on a vast, unimaginable scale, by
tens of thousands of Africans and their descendants. Few doubted, or argued, that the
system remained profitable, and those most intimately involved (merchants, traders,
and planters) remained vociferous in defence of the slave trade. They showed no signs
of conceding defeat because of economic failure.

Celebrations in Parliament (only sixteen voted against abolition in 1807) focussed on

Wilberforce. But is it plausible that so momentous a political shift could be the work of
one man? Equally, is it credible that so massive a change could have happened without
a major shift in underlying British self-interests? Here we confront the legacy of Eric
Williams and his seminal book Capitalism and Slavery. Can this story be told without the
defining elements of economic causation? What was the connection between
economics and abolition in 1807? Historians continue to circle round the
arguments—and around Williams's thesis. In the course of my own career, I've changed
my own mind. I came to the subject convinced of Williams's argument that economics
explains abolition. Today, the argument is much less persuasive (although, oddly, more
widely accepted than ever).

For a start, the evidence does not add up so easily. The slave trade boomed in the very
years when it came under attack. It was ended when Africans were in great demand.
Equally, it is far from clear that profits from slavery underpinned Britain's shift into
industrial growth. Yet this is far from denying the economic importance of the slave
system to Britain before 1807. How could it have been otherwise? After all, the whole
Atlantic system was devised for economic well-being and progress (except for the
Africans and Africa).
The economic value of the slave trade was visible and unavoidable. There were
massive ship-building and out-fitting industries which sustained the slave trade
throughout. Most of the thousands of slave ships sailing to Africa were packed with
cargo disgorged by a host of British industries: textiles from the west country, later from
Lancashire; metal goods from Sheffield; fire-arms (shipped by the hundreds of
thousands) from Birmingham. The slave plantations in the American colonies were
equally dependent on imported goods (and people). Africans in the sugar fields wore
imported clothing and hats, used imported hoes, axes, and other tools, the animals
were harnessed in imported leather (and the slaves beaten by imported whips).
Planters' homes were filled with goods from British industries, from the cutlery and
crockery on the tables to the books on the shelves. Finally, of course, barrels and bales
of slave-grown produce were packed into returning ships, to feed those other booming
sectors of Britain's Atlantic economy—the processing, distribution, and retailing trades.
Sugar to the refineries of Bristol and Liverpool, tobacco from the Chesapeake passing
down the Clyde to the warehouses in Glasgow, all before reaching millions of
consumers

Aftermath of Abolition

All this takes us back to the basic conundrum. Why should the British end the slave
trade at the very point it was in the ascendancy? The results of 1807 were, of course,
profound. After 1807, the British—followed by the Americans in 1808—became a
crusading abolitionist power, using the Royal Navy and diplomacy to impose abolition
on others. Even so, more than a million Africans were illicitly shipped across the Atlantic
after 1807, mainly to Cuba and Brazil. Slavery itself survived, of course, in the British
colonies until 1833-38, in the USA until the Civil War

At a stroke in 1807 the British changed their trading and strategic policy. The Royal
Navy, once the guardian of the Atlantic slave lanes, was now the scourge of slave
traders. Parliament, once a legislature anxious to promote Britain's slaving interests,
was now wedded to global abolition (although it was also keen to ship indentured Indian
labour to fill labour vacuums round the colonial world). Henceforth, the British prided
themselves on their abolitionist credentials.