History in chains

How was the slave trade abolished?

The Slave Trade Act of 1807 – the culmination of nearly 20 years of parliamentary campaigning led by Wilberforce – ended the British trade. The last legal slave ship, Kitty’s Amelia, left Liverpool for Sierra Leone on 27 July that year. The Act was a compromise; slavery itself survived. Abolitionists hoped it would force planters to treat slaves better, since they would not be able to replace them; before then, up to 40% died within three years of arrival. They also hoped it would lead to the end of slavery

altogether, but progress was slow.

Before the modern era, slavery was found in nearly every complex civilisation, including the Babylonian, Egyptian, Persian, Greek, Chinese, Roman, Mughal and

Islamic empires – as well as the pre-Columbian civilisations of the Americas, and the African polities with which European slavers traded. The oldest written law codes, from Mesopotamia around 2000BC, refer to slavery as a well-established institution. In Britain, it was common in the early Middle Ages: it is thought that at the Norman Conquest, around 10% of England’s population were slaves. In 1102, the Council of London condemned “the infamous business, prevalent in England, of selling men like animals”. Northwest Europe in the Middle Ages is a historical outlier, in that

slavery gave way to serfdom, which itself withered. Thanks in part to British action, formal slavery died out

in the Western world in the late 19th century: Brazil, which received four million slaves in total, was the last to abolish it, in 1888. The Arab slave trade existed until the early 20th century; between nine and 14 million Africans were traded east over five centuries (those who converted to Islam were freed). Mauritania abolished slavery in 1981, the last state in the world to do so, though it still exists in many non-legal forms today.

Why was slavery abolished?

In the 1820s and 1830s, West Indian planters found themselves facing a large, articulate opposition made up disproportionately of nonconformists and women. It had become clear that slavery could not be reformed, and could only be maintained using great violence: after the slave rebellion in Jamaica in 1831-2, more than 300 slaves were executed. But economic self-interest played a major role too. Sugar could by then be grown more cheaply by waged labourers in India; slavery was seen as both wrong and uneconomic. Even so, human lives had to be balanced against property rights – and when the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 finally passed, it was the 46,000 slave-owners, not the slaves, who were compensated, with a total of £20m (£17bn in today’s money).