Abolition of Slave Trade
The abolition of the slave trade refers to the movement to end the transportation of enslaved people across the Atlantic Ocean. This movement gained momentum in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, leading to the passage of laws that prohibited the trading of slaves. The abolition of the slave trade was a significant step towards the eventual eradication of slavery in many countries.
6 Key excerpts on "Abolition of Slave Trade"
eBook - ePub- James Walvin(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 18 Abolition and emancipation The campaign to end the slave trade and slavery has puzzled historians perhaps more than any other aspect of the history of slavery. For centuries, the Atlantic slave trade had grown and thrived with very little intellectual or economic opposition, yet by the end of the eighteenth century, powerful abolitionist groups and movements had taken root on both sides of the English-speaking Atlantic. The origins of anti-slavery were complex and international, drawing upon ideas from the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions and finding sustenance in the transformation of the world of dissent in the eighteenth century. Despite the pioneering efforts of American abolitionists, the centre of abolitionist sentiment and organization was Britain. In the early nineteenth century, British abolitionism became the engine behind the drive to abolish slavery worldwide. Indeed, global abolition became a distinctively British passion throughout the nineteenth century, yet this in itself is a historical curiosity, because in the course of the eighteenth century the British had become the greatest slave traders in the Atlantic: a century later, they prided themselves on their abolitionist credentials. Throughout much of its history, few people had questioned Atlantic slavery. From roughly 1776, however, it attracted a growing chorus of criticism. One critical strand emerged from the doubts about human bondage sown by Enlightenment writing. Equally, the ‘Age of Revolutions’ (with its emphasis on rights and equality), beginning with American independence in 1776 and culminating in the French Revolution of 1789, proved corrosive to slavery. It was a process that gathered pace after the Haitian slave revolt of 1791. In Britain and North America, the critical initial role was played by Quakers, who had opposed slavery from the late seventeenth century and had been among the first to do so. Though relatively few in numbers, Quakers were hugely influential...
eBook - ePub- Jeremy Black(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...What the slave trade means for the history of East Africa or the Mediterranean lands is different from what it means for the Atlantic world.DefinitionsAs another indication of variety, we need foremost to consider definitions, for varied definitions of slavery are significant for the account of the slave trade. Slavery is similar to war: in one light, enforced servitude, like large-scale, violent conflict, is easy to define. You know what you see. However, just as discussion of war frequently overlaps with other aspects of conflict and violence—for example, rebellion and terrorism, let alone wars against poverty, crime, ignorance, or drugs—so the same is true with slavery, with force and servitude being open to varying definitions. The International Convention with the Object of Securing the Abolition of Slavery and the Slave Trade (an agreement that was ratified in 1926 by the members of the League of Nations, an international organization, the predecessor of the United Nations, that, due to the decision of Congress, did not include the USA), defined slavery as “the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership” are exercised.That might seem a clear definition, but, in practice, it only emerged after debate and political bargaining designed to protect vested interests and cultural practices. This bargaining led to the exclusion from the definition of slavery of forced labor and concubinage, both of which involved many people inconditions of slavery. The debate can be followed through the sources; and an understanding of this process of negotiation calls into question any attempt to present a definition of slavery as of universal use. For example, in 2000, the International Association Against Slavery decided to include debt bondage, forced work, forced prostitution, and forced marriage in the scope of slavery...
eBook - ePubAtlantic History in the Nineteenth Century
Migration, Trade, Conflict, and Ideas
- Niels Eichhorn(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...Coincidentally, the United States outlawed the international trade in human beings that same year. After 300 years, the horrors of the Middle Passages seemed to slowly come to a close, but ending the slave trade was no easy task. Within a decade, the British desired to broadly prohibit the Atlantic slave trade. The conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars offered an opportunity to enlist other European countries and in the postwar treaties include anti-slave trade stipulations. Furthermore, the independence of the Spanish colonies in the Americas required separate treaties with all of them to suppress the trade. By the mid-1840s, the British devoted dozens of vessels to the anti-slave trade patrols along the African coast. When the Royal Navy captured a slave ship, they usually released the slaves in Sierra Leone, not their original homelands. Most concerning, the United States jealously guarded its neutral rights against searches preventing the treaties from being effective. Even the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812, did not settle the question about search and seizure. As a result, the United States maintained its own inadequate fleet of warships off the West African coast to hunt down slavers flying the US flag. Despite British pressure, Brazil and Spanish-Cuba continued to import slaves until 1850 and 1862, respectively. Spanish-Cuba accepted the end of the trans-Atlantic slave trade because the protection of the US flag had disappeared. By 1867, naval forces had captured over 570 slave ships and liberated 150,000 slaves. 7 A rather small figure considering the 3,303,396 slaves brought to the Americas in the nineteenth century; treaty enforcement worked significantly better than naval enforcement against violators. In 1862, Great Britain and the United States, as leading maritime powers in the Atlantic world, finally agreed to a new slave trade treaty...
eBook - ePubSlavery and the Founders
Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson
- Paul Finkelman(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...By the 1450s African slaves were being imported into southern Europe and the islands off the coast of Portugal. By the early 1500s the Spanish and Portuguese were aggressively bringing African slaves to the New World. The African slave trade would be legal and vigorous throughout the New World until the early nineteenth century. It was legal in what became the United States for nearly 200 years—from the 1620s when African slaves began to arrive in the Dutch and British colonies until 1808 when the law banning the trade went into effect. 9 The slave trade was also legal in countries along the west coast of Africa, where most slaves were put on ships traveling to the New World. Thus, the local governments in Africa supported the trade, participated in it, sanctioned it, taxed it, and profited from it in many ways. Even after the United States and Britain banned the African slave trade, slavery itself was still legal in the United States, most of the British New World colonies, 10 and elsewhere in the New World. Thus, if someone could successfully smuggle a slave into the United States—either from Africa or the Caribbean—that slave could, to some extent, disappear into the existing slave population. A slave illegally brought to the United States would have no reason to know or believe that he or she had a legal claim to freedom and could ask for protection from the government. Thus, the laws ending the trade were unable to completely end this traffic until the nation finally abolished slavery in 1865. Colonial Regulations of the Slave Trade Before the American Revolution, the colonies and Great Britain encouraged, supported, and sometimes regulated the African slave trade in what later became the United States...
eBook - ePub- Sir Reginald Coupland(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Papamoa Press(Publisher)
...But so great were the profits of the Trade that a few brazen speculators were still to be found in Britain prepared to violate the law and to risk one or two captures and the serious financial penalties the Act imposed, if only they could smuggle one cargo safely through. Groups were formed to fit out slave-ships at continental ports and even at Liverpool and London. In 1811, therefore, an amending Act was passed making Slave Trading a felony punishable with transportation. That proved effective; the hardiest gambler shrank from the horrors of Van Dieman’s Land or Botany Bay. And the further Act of 1824, making the Trade piracy and a capital crime, which was passed mainly as a matter of principle and as an example to other nations, was found to be unnecessary and repealed in 1837. The British Slave Trade may be said to have been doomed when Sharp, Clarkson, Wilberforce and their little band of propagandists opened their countrymen’s eyes to the actual brutalities it involved, when such men of light and leading as Wesley, Adam Smith, Porteous, and Bentham came out against it, and when the House of Commons, headed by Pitt and Fox and Burke, was converted to the principle of Abolition. It is not surprising that the Revolution and the war delayed its achievement. More remarkable, indeed, is the fact that, only twenty years after the campaign had started, while the war was still continuing and at a critical phase, a commercial organization, so great and old-established, so immensely profitable, buttressed by such powerful vested interests and regarded so recently as a permanent, if regrettable, necessity of European civilization, should have been destroyed....
eBook - ePub- Paul Finkelman(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...A similar choice was also intruding into more domestic spheres, whether criminal and civil malefactors should be punished by such traditional penalties as fines or execution, or whether they might best be dealt with by selling them to the Atlantic traders—in effect, by deportation. Here analogies from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English history might suggest that the latter remedy was on the increase (but this might be thought a social good rather than an evil). On the whole it is probably true to say that the operation of the slave trade may have tended to integrate, strengthen and develop unitary, territorial political authority, but to weaken or destroy more segmentary societies. Whether this was good or evil may be a nice point; historically it may be seen as purposive and perhaps as more or less inevitable. One may perhaps conclude with the reflexion that, in the context of the times in West Africa, by stopping the slave trade and by attacking slavery, Europeans did much to impoverish and weaken its monarchies. This was so because, on the African side, the slave trade was conducted on a large scale by a relatively small number of major entrepreneurs under state patronage or, indeed, direction. Thus, when the export slave trade was ended, the African monarchies lost a major source of revenue and a large part of the economic structure which supported them. This might not have been the case had the slaves available been put to plantation production for export—an expedient which certainly seems to have been considered, for example by King Gezo of Dahomey in the 1850s. 18 But in practice the so-called ‘legitimate’ trades which replaced the slave trade as the staple of West African foreign commerce tended to be based rather on production by large numbers of small-scale ‘peasant’ farmers. The major kingdoms found difficulty in adapting their fiscal, economic and political systems so as to profit from this change in the economic structure...
