Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade

Abstract

There was nothing quite like the Atlantic slave trade in the long and varied history of the trafficking in enslaved men, women, and children. Although the trans-Saharan slave trade conveyed captives to North Africa and the Middle East over a longer span of time, no previous system approximated the more than 12.5 million embarked from Africa for the Americas from 1492 to 1867.1 In many eras before and after, slave traders transported their victims across vast distances, far from their place of birth. Yet the thousands of miles covered by the typical slave voyage, from Europe to Africa to the Americas, had few if any institutional precedents. The Atlantic slave trade, too, was exceptional in the way that it came to an end. Within the span of four decades, each of the nations responsible for its organization and conduct came to renounce it. In little more than a half century, the slave trade would be effectively suppressed. In other places and in other times, the long-distance trafficking of enslaved peoples sometimes experienced rapid fluctuations too, rising and falling with the onset of war, economic change, or shifts in the political fortunes of the authorities that made the trade possible. Never before, though, had a trade in slaves been denounced and then abolished by the governments of the same peoples who had created it. It is the singularity of this history that accounts in part for the volume and complexity of the scholarly literature about it. The importance of the subject derives also from the many and varied consequencesthat slave trade abolition entailed. Because the traffic connected and entangled the histories of Europe with the history of Africa and the Americas, the effects of abolition would be felt on each continent, upon the content, direction, and regulation of overseas trade from Europe, upon the recruitment and management of labour in the Americas, and upon patterns of economic change across West Africa. For these reasons, the subject holds an important place in the international history of the first half of the nineteenth century. Slave trade abolition reveals, as well as any subject, the ways that individual nations, individual colonies, particular peoples could and did have their fates decided by those who lived at a distance. At the same time, the relatively sudden and relatively quick success of the campaign to abolish the slave trade raises fundamental questions regarding morals, politics, and economics as engines of historical change. Explaining the abolition of the slave trade has seemed to many historians like a useful way to approach much broader problems concerning the possibility of humanitarian action and the powerof the profit motive. For all of these reasons, the scholarly literature on slave trade abolition not only bears upon the specifics of its own history, but also carries implications for a wide variety of subjects pertinent to the making of the modern world. This chapter considers in turn the five principal problems around which that scholarlyliterature has coalesced: the origins of abolitionist ideas and opinion; the emergence and evolution of antislavery movements; the enactment of abolitionist legislation or the declaration of abolitionist ordnances; the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade; and the effects and legacies of that suppression.