Slavery, Diplomacy and Empire: Britain and the Suppression of the Slave Trade, 1807-1975 (review)

This volume collects essays on British antislavery strategies and activism, the Foreign and Colonial Offices' policies and activities, and the work of the Mixed Commission Courts. Despite certain limitations and flaws, it will be of interest to scholars of the British slave trade and its suppression.

After making vast profits from the trade in enslaved Africans, Parliament finally responded to pressure from antislavery organisations and passed the 1807 Act outlawing this trade. As subsequent Acts were passed, traders found new ways to circumvent their restrictions and the trade continued, unabated, notwithstanding treaties with other countries forbidding the commerce in enslaved Africans. It was not until the 1840s that a Royal Naval Squadron with suitable vessels in sufficient numbers was dispatched to the coast of West Africa to capture slaving vessels. Courts, sometimes staffed by Britons alone and other times, in the case of Mixed Commission Courts, staffed by judges from countries that had signed such treaties, were set up to judge the captured slave traders.

Many contributors to the book allude to the idealism of British officials involved in this process, an emphasis that ignores the profits earned by the judges and the Royal Navy and therefore lends an excessively rosy glow to the history. The unqualified and often incompetent judges were paid from the profits of the sale of slaving vessels: some British officials grew very rich from these captures. These funds were also used as prize money for the Royal Navy.

Foreign and Colonial Office officials were also often less than idealistic or disinterested. The political importance of Portugal to Britain necessitated careful and often toothless diplomacy. One example of political pressures preventing any meaningful action can be found in Britain's treatment of the ongoing slavery (as "forced labour") in Sao Tomé and Principe, from which British companies imported cocoa, in the period between 1894 and 1910. And how to explain British law officers who sometimes actually questioned the legality of declared policies, such as the statute of 1839 empowering Britain to seize and try Brazilian vessels? Brazil was a colony of Portugal. British funds were used in Brazil to influence governments and abolitionists; if the aim is declared to be humanistic, can we not also accurately label it as bribery?

This collection's primary limitation is an excessive focus on diplomacy without a sufficiently detailed or sceptical analysis. To detail diplomatic activity without a full political, historical, and commercial context results in a biased picture that fails to explore the many possible reasons and motivations for diplomacy. For example, activities could be undertaken both to prevent conflict and to exert pressure regarding a particular issue. And what was the effect of the diplomacy? Was publicity—that is, presenting a positive picture of Britain abroad—deemed sufficient motivation for diplomacy? Without adequate enforcement—and the essays in this book indicate wholly inadequate enforcement—Acts passed and treaties signed remained pieces of publicity, of diplomacy, and were perhaps used to cover up what was really going on.

The contributors to this volume leave a number of related questions unexplored. What was the effect of the 1807 Act abolishing British participation in the trade in enslaved Africans? It certainly did not stop participation, as evidenced by the many subsequent Acts that were equally ignored by the participants then and by the authors of this book now. Was the Act used mainly to attempt to prevail upon other slave traders—in other words, competitors—to stop trading? And where was the equally lauded 1833 Act ending slavery in British colonies applied? The Act itself indicated it only applied to Cape Town, Ceylon, Canada, and the West Indies—thus it had no application in the remainder of the existing and ever-growing British Empire. Did anyone ever question this? Did it require diplomatic interventions or cover-ups?

In fact, ongoing slavery, often described as forced...