The British trade in African slaves proved both Britain’s darkest hour and its shining moment because of their early activity in promoting the slave trade, and their lead in ending all slave trading respectively. British merchants helped promote the trade in African slaves by finding trading partners, who traded slaves, and in turn trading those slaves in the New World. Some British merchants even went a step further, assisting local traders in capturing slaves for trading. While these early activities fall into the darkest hour, the push to eliminate the slave trade and the lead they took in ending this activity shines as a great moment for the Empire. With the beginning of the abolitionist movement in Britain and Parliamentary acts against the trade, the Empire took the lead and worked with other nations to end the practice of slave trading. However, due to the profits slavers could earn and the New World’s demand, many ship captains risked breaking the British laws against trading slaves. Therefore, Britain unleashed her Navy, in an attempt to stop slave trading on the oceans. In the continent of Africa, where the slaves originated, Britain used her military to stop the capture, transportation, and sale of slaves. Though Britain actively engaged in the slave trade, their lead in the movement to abolish the trade proved their shining moment in terms of ethics and morality.
Before we can understand the slave trade, and why Africans would willingly participate in the trade, we must also understand their concept of what slavery was. Slavery existed in Africa, as it had in much of the world before this time, and they had customs and rules, which owners of slaves followed. These owners did so, to prevent themselves from becoming disgraced, as it was dishonorable to violate these customs. People born to a slave received the designation of domestic slave, and the sale of these slaves could only occur after a public trial; also, the master’s only authority over them was reasonable correction. However, once a person became a slave, it was generally for life; though, the opportunity for them to gain their freedom did exist. Some ways a slave may have earned his freedom were by capturing two slaves for his owner as ransom, performing some service for the master, in the event of the master’s death, or simply by escaping.[1] In the Americas, slavery took a more sinister edge. None of the cultural rules for owning a slave applied. Children of slaves were slaves, treated much like livestock, something owners bred and sold. In addition, much like livestock, upon the owner’s death they were inheritance and no possibility of freedom existed.
British merchants promoted the slave trade by actively participating in the triangular Atlantic trade, which brought slaves from Africa to the New World, raw materials from the New World to Britain, and finished products from Britain to the New World and Africa. Since the practice of slavery and the slave trade already existed in Africa, merchants had no problem finding trading partners. These slaves in Africa came from various methods, such as captured in war, kidnapping, sold by relatives or superiors, debt, or judicial process.[2] With such access to slaves, it is important to know how many slaves actually moved across the Atlantic to the New World and how active Britain was in this trade. From 1700 to 1808, Britain transported 3.1 million slaves to the Americas and the Caribbean Islands, while the French, who also participated in the slave trade, moved just over 1 million.[3] The number of slaves transplanted from Africa to the New World, shows Britain fully participated in the slave trade and actively sought to purchase slaves for transport to the Americas.
Some British slave traders went beyond just finding available slaves to purchase and actually took to participating in the raids and capturing slaves themselves. John Hawkins, a successful slave trader, detailed how he and his crew worked to obtain slaves on his third voyage from Guinea to the Americas. He mentioned in his journal that he and his crew landed and obtained only a few Negroes, but sustained many men injured, including himself. Later to obtain more Africans, he entered an alliance with a local king to raid a neighboring village and obtain captives. The first assault his men launched on the village failed and they later returned with him leading the assault. In the end, they captured 250 men, women, and children for trading. His local partner captured 600 prisoners, but did not share them with the British traders.[4] This first person account of raiding for slaves shows the extent some traders would go to secure slaves for trading. John Hawkins’ account appears abnormal, but if he personally raided for slaves, one can easily conclude that other traders did so also.
The volume of slaves traded by British merchants and their acts show how the slave trade was the darkest hour of the British Empire. However, attitudes would change and these changes brought about the shining moment for the Empire, as Britain would take the lead in abolishing the slave trade with legislation, diplomacy, and the use of their military.
Britain took the lead in the movement to eliminate the slave trade through a strong abolitionist movement, which began with the Quakers, then through acts of Parliament, and finally through diplomacy with other European nations. The Quakers began the abolition movement in Britain and soon garnered a sizeable following related to the elimination of the slave trade. Quakers in America and England began the movement to abolish the slave trade and by 1787 founded a national committee in London to abolish the slave trade.[5] This committee pressured Parliament to create some method of ending the slave trade and found their first success in 1791. The Sierra Leone Bill of 1791 granted a charter for the Sierra Leone colony and created the first free labor colony under the control of the crown. This colony served a dual purpose, to prohibit the operation or support of the slave trade in land directly under the colony’s jurisdiction and to become an oasis of abolition in the heart of the slave coast. This bill, creating a colony to act as an experiment to prove Adam Smith’s theory that free labor was superior to slave labor, passed Parliament by a vote of 87 to 9.[6] Within Parliament, there were several staunch abolitionists, led by William Wilberforce, who continued to push for more abolition legislation. Finally, in 1807, the House of Commons voted on an act to abolish the slave trade, passing by a vote of 283 to 16. The king signed this law on March 25 and it took effect May 1, 1807.[7] Along with this act, the British took other measures to ensure the enforcement of the anti-slave trading law, such as establishing a Vice-Admiralty Court in Sierra Leone and setting up a committee to help enforce the abolition laws and convince local chiefs to abandon the trade.[8] While these new measures began to hinder the trans-Atlantic trade, they could not stop it and the penalties for violating these laws were minimal. In 1810, Henry Brougham, a lawyer from Edinburgh, began petitioning Parliament to adopt stricter provisions to strengthen the existing anti-slavery laws and put several new measures before Parliament to affect this end.[9] Despite the laws passed by Britain, the abolition of the slave trade could not occur without international cooperation. Therefore, Britain also engaged in diplomacy with other European nations, eventually culminating in the Brussels Act of 1890, where seventeen countries agreed to end slave trading on land and sea.[10] With full international cooperation, under the British lead, the dream of abolishing the slave trade finally became a possibility.
After passing the Abolition Act of 1807, Britain faced the problem of how to enforce it, which involved the use of the British Navy. Using the navy to enforce Britain’s will on the seas had become commonplace by this time. Britain had the largest and most powerful navy in the world, proven by their overwhelming victory at Trafalgar. To enforce the Abolition Act, Britain sent ships to the African coast, not only to enforce the act, but also to inform the African chiefs of the benefits of cooperation.[11] While France had also banned the slave trade under Napoleon, which also included all countries under French control, this did not prevent other nations, such as Portugal, from engaging in the salve trade. From 1810 to 1814, there was a great push through diplomacy and raw military power to end the slave trade. In 1810, Portugal, although not completely willingly, signed a treaty of alliance pledging cooperation in the gradual abolition of the slave trade and agreeing not to operate in any African territory not under Portuguese control.[12] Part of the reason the British were so eager to end the slave trade is because they believed they could render abolition universal, as they had a near monopoly of the salve trade and of naval power; therefore, equally distributing the impact of abolition.[13] This use of the navy to limit the slave trade affected all aspects of the slave trade and forced other nations to join with Britain in abolishing the trade of African slaves.
While the navy patrolled the seas for slave ships and slave ports, Britain also used their military to enforce the anti-slave trading laws on the continent directly. On the continent, the trading of slaves proved harder to stop, as it was culturally acceptable to own slaves. Despite many efforts to end this trade along the slave coast, Nigeria remained a hotbed of slave trading activity. In 1897, Sir George Goldie of the Royal Niger Company invaded and conquered the emirates of Nupe and Ilorin for the purpose of suppressing slavery and slave raiding. F.D. Lugard saw his wars, in 1901, against the emirs of Nupe and Kontagaora, as motivated by the desire to end wars between the emirates and suppress slave trade and slave raiding.[14] Despite defeating several of the slave trading emirs in Nigeria, slave traders continued slave raiding and trading slaves along secret routes. To combat this trade, the police and military occupied the slave markets and patrolled the most commonly known routes.[15] This delivered the biggest blow to the traders, as they needed to find new places to conduct their trade. This willingness to use the military to conquer non-compliant territories and enforce the rules of Britain throughout the British Empire shows the commitment Britain had towards ending the slave trade.
The participation of British merchants in the slave trade casts a dark shadow on the Empire, while the efforts of the British to end the slave trade throughout the world definitely proved a shining moment in the history of the British Empire. This dark time for the British came from not only their willing participation in slave trade, but also because of the scale in which they participated. This participation included both displacing large amounts of people against their will to a new land and in actually raiding for Africans to sell as slaves. Although we cannot condemn these acts if we view them in accordance with the time in which they occurred, they remain a black smudge on the face of the Empire today. The push to abolish the slave trade that originated with the Quakers in England and America created the atmosphere where Britain could begin to end the slave trade. During the early nineteenth century only Britain could take the lead in abolishing the slave trade and they overwhelmingly did. This lead came in several forms, from granting free labor colony charters in Africa, to acts of Parliament abolishing the slave trade, and working with other nations through diplomacy, sometimes forced, to end the slave trade. To enforce the laws they passed, Britain used her navy along the coast of Africa to stop slave-trading vessels; while on the continent, they used the military to take control of slave trading territories and patrol known slave-trading routes. Since slavery and slave trading were widely accepted, this work to abolish slave trading definitely resonates as the shining moment of the Empire, because Britain was so far ahead of the rest of the world morally and ethically on this issue.
Sources:
Ackerson, Wayne. The African Institution (1807-1827) and the Antislavery Movement in Great Britain. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, Ltd., 2005.
Drescher, Seymour, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition. 2nd ed. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
Klein, Herbert, The Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999
Ubah, C.N., “Suppression of the Slave Trade in the Nigerian Emirates.” The Journal of African History, Vol. 32, No. 3 (1991) 447 – 470
Notes:
[1] Mungo Park, “West Africa in the 1790s,” in The Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. David Northrup 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002), pp. 32-38
[2] P.E.H. Hair, “African Narratives of Enslavement,” in The Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. David Northrup 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002), pp. 39-44
[3] Herbert Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 33.
[4] John Hawkins, “An Alliance to Raid Slaves,” in The Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. David Northrup 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002), pp. 102-103
[5] Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 12.
[6] Drescher, Econocide, 115.
[7] Wayne Ackerson, The African Institution (1807-1827) and the Antislavery Movement in Great Britain (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2005), 15.
[8] Ibid., 56.
[9] Ibid., 77.
[10] C.N. Ubah, “Suppression of the Salve Trade in the Nigerian Emirates” The Journal of African History, Vol. 32, No. 3 (1991): 447.
[11] Ackerson, The African Institution, 33.
[12] Drescher, Econocide, 151.
[13] Drescher, Econocide, 158.
[14] Ubah, “Suppression of the Slave Trade in the Nigerian Emirates,” 450.
