Introduction

The act to abolish the slave trade in 1807 was, by any standards, a remarkable piece of legislation. First, it marked the end of British dominance in the Atlantic slave trade. Second, it ushered in a new phase in British overseas history: after 1807 Great Britain became, at a stroke, the world's leading abolitionist power. The act of 1807 represented a decisive shift in Britain's dealings with the outside world. But behind this apparently simple change, from slaving to abolition, there lurked a complexity of issues, and this special supplement to Parliamentary History is designed to address many of those questions. The essays in this volume bear testimony both to the significance of 1807 and to the broad-ranging historical and intellectual challenges posed by the abolition of the slave trade in 1807.

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The Atlantic slave trade was the largest single enforced movement of people in the pre-modern world. There had been other slave trades, notably in the world of Greek and Roman antiquity. But the shipping of Africans across the Atlantic has no parallel in numbers, or organized brutality, until the totalitarian regimes' transportations of people in the twentieth century. It was a trade which spanned almost four centuries, from the age of Columbus through to the 1860s, and it involved all the major maritime powers and states of Europe and the Americas. Though the British came to dominate the trade, it was pioneered by the Spaniards, Portuguese and Dutch. They were eagerly followed by the British and the French - even by the Danes and Germans. It was a trade which yielded potential profits that few could resist. From an early date, European (later North American and Brazilian) shippers and merchants had no qualms about buying Africans and shipping them to the Americas. There was, it is true, an early and persistent religious criticism of the Atlantic slave trade, but such criticisms were easily drowned or ignored by the sound of successful and expansive commerce. Profits ensured that morality was silenced. The end result was that the slave trade developed almost as if it were morally neutral: a form of trade the benefits from which silenced any adverse critic. This was true of all European slave trading nations and of all the American colonies.

The images of the Atlantic slave trade remain embedded in modern popular memory: the brutal packing of Africans below decks, the manacles and chains, the guns trained on the decks - all remain potent images in popular recollection two centuries later. They were also images which after 1787 were used to great political effect by the abolitionist campaign. But, even more than the imagery, it is perhaps the numbers which leave the most indelible impression. We know of 34,000 slave voyages, some 5,000 from Liverpool: of 12 million Africans loaded on to the slave ships, and more than ten million survivors stumbling ashore in the Americas. They had no idea where they were. Year after year, Africans greatly outnumbered European settlers arriving in the Americas. By the 1820s, for example, of the people who had crossed the Atlantic to settle in the Americas, only 2.5 million were white - the rest were Africans. And they, of course, had been forced across the Atlantic in the slave ships. Until the 1820s the enslaved African was, in many respects, the typical pioneer of American settlement.

The British (initially the English) came relatively late to the slave trade. But the establishment of their own colonies in the Americas and the shift to sugar production proved a turning point. The Brazilians had already shown that sugar plantations were labour intensive, and European settlers could never secure enough labour among local indigenous people, or European settlers (free or unfree). But Africa had already yielded an abundance of labour to Europeans. Enslaved Africans had, for centuries, been traded along the overland caravan routes to North Africa. Existing forms of African slavery had been eagerly exploited by early Europeans traders and explorers on the West African coast. The Spaniards and Portuguese for example had used Africans as slaves in Spain and Portugal and in their Atlantic islands before they settled...