The Abolition Movement in Britain

The British abolition movement was the first great human-rights campaign of the modern world. Beginning in 1787 with the foundation of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and ending with the passage of the 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act, the movement produced a body of political and legal precedent that has, over the past two centuries, been applied to the campaign against the slave trade in East Africa, the campaign against forced labour in the Belgian Congo, and the campaign against apartheid in South Africa. As Christopher Leslie Brown has argued in Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (2006), the British abolition movement was the founding case of the modern humanitarian politics.

The movement was the work of a small, well-organised, and politically sophisticated group of Evangelical Anglicans, Quakers, and political radicals. The Clapham Sect — William Wilberforce, Henry Thornton, Granville Sharp, Zachary Macaulay, and the Venns — provided the political leadership; the Quakers provided the organisational discipline and the bulk of the early petitions; the Evangelicals and the Methodists provided the popular base. As David Brion Davis has shown in The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966), the ideological foundations of the movement were the product of three centuries of European reflection on the relationship between natural rights, Christian theology, and commercial society.

The Origins: The Clapham Sect and the Evangelical Conscience

The British abolition movement emerged from the late-eighteenth-century Evangelical revival. The founding document of the campaign was the 1787 Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, founded on 22 May 1787 at the London Tavern, Bishopsgate, with twelve members present. The committee’s first act was to present a memorial to William Pitt the Younger urging parliamentary inquiry into the trade. The committee’s second act was to launch a national petition campaign that would, by 1792, gather 519 petitions from British towns and cities.

The campaign’s most important political figure was, by common consent, William Wilberforce (1759–1833), the Member of Parliament for Yorkshire. Wilberforce’s 12 May 1789 speech in the House of Commons set out the abolition case in terms that were to dominate the parliamentary debate for the next twenty years. Wilberforce’s role was that of the parliamentary leader; the political and intellectual work of the campaign was done by Thomas Clarkson, who travelled the country gathering evidence, and by the Quaker and Evangelical networks that sustained the campaign. As Clare Taylor has argued in British and American Abolitionists: An Episode in Transnational Understanding (1974), the campaign was the first example in modern history of a transnational social movement — a network of British and American abolitionists who cooperated across the Atlantic, and who would, in 1840, found the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London.

The Campaign of 1787–1807

The campaign of 1787–1807 was conducted on three fronts: the parliamentary, the popular, and the international. The parliamentary front centred on the introduction of successive abolition bills by Wilberforce: the 1791 bill, defeated in the House of Commons by 163 votes to 88; the 1804 bill, blocked in the House of Lords. The popular front centred on the petition campaign, the publication of slave narratives (Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery of 1787 and Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative of 1789 were the most influential), and the production of a substantial popular literature of abolition.

The international front was the most surprising. The 1815 Congress of Vienna, at which the British delegation, led by Viscount Castlereagh, secured the inclusion in the Final Act of a condemnation of the slave trade, was a diplomatic triumph. The 1817 Anglo-Portuguese Treaty and the 1817 Anglo-Spanish Treaty, by which Portugal and Spain agreed to limit their slave trades to the South Atlantic and Caribbean respectively, were the practical implementation. The 1819 extension of the British right of search to Portuguese and Spanish ships was the legal basis of the international enforcement regime that the West Africa Squadron would, from 1808, attempt to police.

The 1807 Slave Trade Act

The 1807 Slave Trade Act, which received the Royal Assent on 25 March 1807, prohibited the British slave trade throughout the British Empire from 1 May 1807. The Act’s preamble was, in its moral language, a remarkable document: “Whereas the African Slave Trade is contrary to the Principles of Justice, Humanity, and sound Policy, and is highly dishonourable to the British Crown, and a proper Subject for the Consideration of Parliament.” The passage is one of the founding documents of the modern British humanitarian tradition, and the first formal use by the British Parliament of the language of human rights in a legislative text.

The 1807 Act was, in its enforcement regime, a substantial innovation. The Act authorised the Royal Navy to detain and search vessels suspected of engaging in the slave trade, and to free the enslaved people found on board. The West Africa Squadron, established in 1808, would, by 1860, have detained some 1,600 slave ships and freed perhaps 150,000 captives. As Hugh Thomas has shown in The Slave Trade (1997), the Squadron was a substantial humanitarian achievement and a substantial human cost: perhaps 1,500 British seamen died of disease on the West African station between 1808 and 1860.

The Abolition of Slavery: 1823–1833

The campaign for the abolition of slavery itself, as distinct from the slave trade, was the second phase of the British abolition movement. The 1823 founding of the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions (later the Anti-Slavery Society), under the leadership of Thomas Fowell Buxton, marked the beginning of a sustained campaign against the institution of slavery itself. The campaign was conducted on three fronts: the parliamentary, the popular, and the colonial.

The 1831 Christmas Rebellion (the “Baptist War”) in Jamaica, led by Samuel Sharpe, was the colonial moment. The rebellion demonstrated to the British public the cost of the slavery system in lives and property: perhaps 1,000 enslaved people were killed in the suppression of the rebellion, and the property damage was substantial. The 1833 introduction of Stanley’s Abolition Bill, which was passed by the House of Commons by an overwhelming majority on 26 July 1833 and which received the Royal Assent on 28 August 1833, was the parliamentary conclusion of the campaign. The 1833 Act took effect on 1 August 1834, abolished slavery throughout the British Empire, and provided for the payment of £20 million in compensation to slave-owners (see [/british-empire-economy/labor-and-slavery/compensation-payments-slave-owners/]).

The Afterlife of Abolition

The British abolition movement did not end with the 1833 Act. The campaign against the apprenticeship system in the British Caribbean, the campaign against the slave trade in East Africa, the campaign against slavery in the Indian Ocean, the campaign against forced labour in the Belgian Congo — all of these were continuations of the campaign. The 1885 Berlin Conference, which committed the European powers to the suppression of the slave trade in East and Central Africa, was the international moment. The 1890 Brussels Convention was the legal foundation. The 1926 Slavery Convention of the League of Nations was the twentieth-century consolidation.

The campaign was, as the political philosopher Hannah Arendt argued, the founding case of the modern human-rights movement. The legal instruments that the campaign produced — the 1807 Act, the 1815 Final Act of Vienna, the 1926 Convention, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — were the foundation of the post-1945 international human-rights order. As Robin Blackburn has argued in An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Aboriginal People (2011) and elsewhere, the abolition movement was the necessary precondition of the twentieth-century human-rights revolution, and the British abolitionists were its founding generation.

A Primary Source: The Wilberforce Speech of 1789

Wilberforce’s 12 May 1789 speech on the slave trade set out the abolition case in terms that were to dominate the parliamentary debate for the next twenty years: “So enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable did its wickedness appear to my own mind, that I could scarcely consider it as admissible to use any language on the subject which was not perfectly clear, and which did not carry immediate conviction with it. … I shall never rest till I have effected its abolition. I have read the histories of other countries, and I have been astonished to find the man of Homer’s record so different from the man of his day — so vast a difference in the scale of humanity. … I cannot but express my astonishment, that there should be found, in this enlightened and humane age, a set of men, calling themselves Christians, who should be guilty of such infernal wickedness.”

A Primary Source: The 1807 Act

The 1807 Act declared: “the African Slave Trade is contrary to the Principles of Justice, Humanity, and sound Policy, and is highly dishonourable to the British Crown.” The 1833 Act, in turn, declared that “it is just and expedient that all such Persons should be manumitted and set free, and that a reasonable Compensation should be made to the Persons hitherto entitled to the Services of such Slaves.” The two texts together mark the formal beginning of the modern British humanitarian tradition.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the British abolition movement has been transformed since the 1940s. Eric Williams, in Capitalism and Slavery (1944), argued that abolition was the consequence of the decline of the West Indian sugar interest rather than of a humanitarian movement. Seymour Drescher, in Econocide (1977), challenged the Williams thesis: Drescher showed that British slavery was profitable until the moment of abolition, and that abolition was the consequence of a substantial moral and political movement. Christopher Leslie Brown, in Moral Capital (2006), has recently placed the campaign in the broader context of the British imperial project, and has argued that the moral and the political were inseparable. The unresolved question is how far the British abolition movement was a genuinely humanitarian movement, and how far it was an instrument of British commercial and political interest; the consensus, as James Walvin has argued, is that both readings are necessary.

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