The Slave Trade in the British Empire

The British slave trade was the largest single commercial enterprise of the British Empire between 1672 and 1807, and it was abolished not because the British had ceased to profit from it but because they had begun to profit more from the capital it had built. Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944) framed the question, and four decades of historical work — by Joseph Inikori, David Richardson, Seymour Drescher, Robin Blackburn, and the contributors to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database at Emory — have tested, qualified, and occasionally complicated his answer. The right reading is the one Williams proposed: the slave trade paid for the industrial revolution, and the industrial revolution made the slave trade dispensable.

The Royal African Company and the Opening of the Trade

The British slave trade was, in its early-modern phase, a chartered monopoly. The Royal African Company, chartered in 1672 under the parliamentary leadership of the Duke of York (the future James II), held the British monopoly on the West African trade until 1698. The Company transported perhaps 250,000 enslaved Africans in its first three decades, of whom a substantial fraction died in the Middle Passage. It was the loss of the Company’s monopoly in 1698, with the Act for the More Easy Recovery of Debts in Africa and Elsewhere, that opened the trade to Bristol, Liverpool, and London privateers.

The numerical result was staggering. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database identifies some 12,500 British slaving voyages between 1662 and 1807, transporting roughly 3.4 million Africans to the Americas. Britain was, in the eighteenth century, the largest single national carrier — outshipping Portugal, France, and the Netherlands combined. Bristol was the principal port until the 1740s; Liverpool displaced it in the 1750s and held the lead until abolition in 1807. By the 1790s, Liverpool was dispatching more than 100 slave ships a year. The trade financed the docks, the warehouses, the bank clearings, and the merchant houses of the Atlantic port cities.

The African Trade and Its Domestic Consequences

The trade in manufactures across the Atlantic, from Britain to West Africa, generated sustained demand for the goods that Lancashire, Birmingham, and Sheffield produced. The cotton textiles, firearms, copper rods, brass pans, and rum that bought enslaved Africans also paid the wages of British workers. Inikori’s Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England (2002) made the case, in the Williams tradition, that the slave-trade-derived demand for British manufactures was, between 1690 and 1807, the single most important external stimulus to British industrialisation. The argument remains contested. Drescher’s Econocide (1977) argued that the British slave trade was already in decline relative to other Atlantic trades by 1800, and that the economic interests of the British economy were, in fact, no longer tied to the slave trade. The more cautious position, taken by Blackburn in The Making of New World Slavery (1997), is that the trade created a layer of liquid capital and a market for manufactures whose importance to British industrialisation is real but cannot be precisely quantified.

The Campaign for Abolition

The campaign against the slave trade was, in its parliamentary phase, the work of a sustained evangelical minority inside the British political class. The 1787 Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, founded by Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp, included nine MPs led by William Wilberforce. The first abolition bill was introduced in 1791 and defeated 163 to 88. A second bill, in 1792, was talked out. A third, in 1793, was defeated 122 to 62. The campaign lost the parliamentary battle, but it won the public-relations war: between 1787 and 1792, the Committee published roughly 500 pamphlets, organised a sugar boycott that removed 300,000 consumers from West Indian sugar, and produced the visual iconography — the Wedgwood medallion, the frontispiece of Clarkson’s History — that defined the political movement.

The slave-trade question was reanimated by the 1804 election, in which Pitt returned to office with a substantial abolitionist majority. The 1806 election consolidated the majority. On 23 February 1807, the House of Commons voted 283 to 16 for the second reading of the abolition bill. The bill received the Royal Assent on 25 March 1807 and took effect on 1 May 1807. The preamble is the founding document of the British humanitarian tradition: “Whereas the African Slave Trade is contrary to the Principles of Justice, Humanity, and sound Policy, and is highly dishonourable to the British Crown.”

The West Africa Squadron and the Aftermath of 1807

Abolition was, of course, a national act, and the British slave trade had been the largest component of an international trade. The West Africa Squadron, established at Freetown and Cape Coast Castle in 1808, was the Royal Navy’s attempt to enforce abolition against foreign carriers. At its peak in the 1850s the Squadron had 25 ships and 2,000 men on station, and had freed perhaps 1,500 enslaved Africans a year. The cost was heavy: between 1808 and 1860, 1,567 Royal Navy seamen died of tropical disease on the African station, and 1,032 were killed in action. The figure is a small fraction of the trade the Squadron failed to suppress. An estimated 3.5 million enslaved Africans were transported across the Atlantic in the half-century after 1807, the great majority in Brazilian and Spanish American ships.

The British campaign against the East African slave trade, organised from Zanzibar and Aden, was a different and more ambiguous enterprise. The 1890 Brussels Convention, which committed the European powers to the suppression of the East African trade, was followed by the 1900 creation of the East Africa Protectorate, whose administration was built on the enforcement of abolition. The historical reckoning is complicated by the fact that the abolitionist campaign produced, in Uganda and elsewhere, new systems of forced labour under the cover of “free” cultivation. The literature on this is reflected in Frederick Cooper’s From Slaves to Squatters (1980) and in the work of the historians of the East African labour system collected by the Journal of African History.

The Slave Trade in the Williams Debate

The 1944 Williams thesis — that abolition was the consequence of the declining profitability of the West Indian sugar interest rather than the moral pressure of the evangelical abolitionists — has had a long half-life. Inikori extended the thesis into a general claim about the relationship between the slave trade and British industrialisation. Drescher rebutted the thesis by showing that the West Indian interest was, in fact, still politically powerful in 1807. Richardson and the Emory database team have provided the quantitative scaffolding on which the debate now rests. The present position is that the slave trade mattered both as a source of capital and as a source of demand for British manufactures; that the moral campaign mattered both as a political cause and as the rhetorical vehicle by which declining economic interests were made into national policy; and that the two explanations are not mutually exclusive. Williams was right that the slave trade paid for the industrial revolution. He may have been wrong that moral sentiment was a thin cover for economic interest. The present generation of historians has, on the whole, declined to give the British Empire’s commercial legacy a clean bill of health.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the British slave trade has been transformed since the 1940s by three rounds of work. Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944) framed the question in terms of the relationship between the slave trade and British industrialisation. Hugh Thomas’s The Slave Trade (1997) and Robin Blackburn’s The Making of New World Slavery (1997) provided the narrative and the analytical scaffolding. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, established at Emory in 2008, has provided the empirical base on which the present generation of arguments rests. The unresolved question is the weight to assign to economic interest and to moral sentiment in the abolition of 1807. The present generation of historians has, on the whole, refused to choose.

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