After sustained campaigning in Britain, the Slavery Abolition Act came into force in 1834 and finally banned slavery throughout the Empire. In order to free some 800,000 slaves, Parliament paid a huge £20m – a third of the Treasury’s annual income at the time – in compensation to the slave owners in the Caribbean, South Africa and Canada. And in 1843 Britons were forbidden to own slaves anywhere in the world.
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So many nations reneged on their promises that Britain placed a naval squadron off the coasts of West Africa, looking to intercept slave ships: the West Africa Squadron. This patrol, sometimes just a handful of ships, sometimes as many as 20, patrolled the Atlantic from 1808 to 1870, landing their human cargo at Freetown in Sierra Leone, a colony set up for freed slaves. Over 62 years the Royal Navy captured hundreds of slave ships and freed some 160,000 captives. Several hundreds of thousands more were saved by diplomatic and naval pressure.
This patrol was expensive both in money – a great deal of British tax payers money – and in life. Over 60 years or so patrolling the Atlantic, some 17,000 sailors died; some killed in action, some from the same diseases as the slaves they freed, including fever, dysentry, yellow fever and malaria. This represented one sailor’s life lost for every nine slaves freed.
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In Africa Britain made some 45 treaties with African rulers to stop slaving at source, however in some cases they had to be paid off. Quite often Britain was also invited to offer protection, for example Africans on the coast were being terrorised by the aggressive slave kingdom of Ashanti and requested British protection.
In 1839 the British Foreign Secretary Palmerston ordered the seizure of Portuguese slave ships and in 1845 his successor Lord Aberdeen declared Brazilian slavers as pirates and open to seizure.
In 1850 the British navy entered Brazilian ports to destroy or seize the slave ships, a decisive action in ‘persuading’ Brazil, the biggest slave buyer of them all, to end slavery.
One thing that is often ignored in covering this: the ulterior motive. Aside from the obvious benefit of establishing the world's oceans as under the jurisdiction of the Royal Navy. First of all:...
One thing that is often ignored in covering this: the ulterior motive. Aside from the obvious benefit of establishing the world's oceans as under the jurisdiction of the Royal Navy.
First of all: slavery, especially chattel, is economically efficient. In a short span of time, entire generations can be raised, put to specific work, and can be treated as poorly as they'll survive. Hell, in a lot of ways, the worse you treat people, the better they are at completing rote tasks. It's a toxic practice that destroys the minds and culture of those who engage with it, but if you want to outfit armies and ships ad infinitum, you need people starving in the fields and drenched in tarpitch in the shipyards.
The Brits (speaking of the loci of power) got into it bigly, early on, and pioneered "race science" to try and lubricate the traders and owners against the abrasion of their depravities. But it eventually ran through, and their home populace demanded an end.
Conveniently, Britain came into a different mode of exploitation around that time: hegemonic colonialism. Between the British Raj and the Opium wars, not to mention a few other happenings in Asia, they were able to use private control of the relative-to-europe enormous populations to extract a larger and more apparently ethical yield from the nearly feudal structures they erected across the continent.
But even compared to those economies of scale, slavery was more compatible with industrialization, and destroying society down to the individual reduces the risks of insurgencies. So they were caught in an arms race with France and Spain, and now the Prussians are in the game too, and they're the only party without this particular kind of economic cheatcode. What could be a better way to even the playing field than to begin enacting piracy against any ships contributing to this disadvantage?
So yeah. Good on them, but the abolition was only PR. Their partner in this was Belgium, and digging into the Belgian Congo and the history of England in Asia might be a good way to gauge the humanitarian intentions.
I think there's room for nuance. British abolitionism, like in other areas, was driven by true believers. Many of them were quakers, and to add even more nuance, while many of them strictly...
I think there's room for nuance. British abolitionism, like in other areas, was driven by true believers. Many of them were quakers, and to add even more nuance, while many of them strictly believed slavery was immoral, their preferred solution to free Africans was to ship them back to Africa (Sierre Leone was the notable one, which was a bit of a disaster for complicated reasons) - also what Lincoln believed.
All that being said, Equiano, Wilberfore, More and the rest of the "core" movement really believed in the inherent immorality of slavery, and certainly that the treatment of Blacks in British territories in the west indies was abhorrent.
What you said isn't wrong - it takes two to tango. If the Whigs could be convinced to be abolitionist, you still need the Tories to come along. Geopolitical reasons, the ever-present threat of slave revolts after Tacky's revolt and the revolution in Haiti, and of course the massive payout were good reasons to come along.
Absolutely! Broadly, the champions at home were motivated for all the right reasons, but as you said, two to tango. It just felt like the craven side of this had been neglected by the article.
Absolutely! Broadly, the champions at home were motivated for all the right reasons, but as you said, two to tango. It just felt like the craven side of this had been neglected by the article.
I think the main thing I got from the article is the scale of it. It's one thing to learn a few important dates in history: the British banned the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in 1834. Ho hum....
I think the main thing I got from the article is the scale of it. It's one thing to learn a few important dates in history: the British banned the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in 1834. Ho hum. It's quite another to understand what it took to put that into practice.
It's a lot of lives and resources to spend on "only PR" and they stuck with it for decades. Stopping the slave trade wasn't quick or easy. There was a lot of resistance.
Since we're talking about a worldwide empire, both the good things and bad things about the British empire were happening at enormous scale.
From the article:
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One thing that is often ignored in covering this: the ulterior motive. Aside from the obvious benefit of establishing the world's oceans as under the jurisdiction of the Royal Navy.
First of all: slavery, especially chattel, is economically efficient. In a short span of time, entire generations can be raised, put to specific work, and can be treated as poorly as they'll survive. Hell, in a lot of ways, the worse you treat people, the better they are at completing rote tasks. It's a toxic practice that destroys the minds and culture of those who engage with it, but if you want to outfit armies and ships ad infinitum, you need people starving in the fields and drenched in tarpitch in the shipyards.
The Brits (speaking of the loci of power) got into it bigly, early on, and pioneered "race science" to try and lubricate the traders and owners against the abrasion of their depravities. But it eventually ran through, and their home populace demanded an end.
Conveniently, Britain came into a different mode of exploitation around that time: hegemonic colonialism. Between the British Raj and the Opium wars, not to mention a few other happenings in Asia, they were able to use private control of the relative-to-europe enormous populations to extract a larger and more apparently ethical yield from the nearly feudal structures they erected across the continent.
But even compared to those economies of scale, slavery was more compatible with industrialization, and destroying society down to the individual reduces the risks of insurgencies. So they were caught in an arms race with France and Spain, and now the Prussians are in the game too, and they're the only party without this particular kind of economic cheatcode. What could be a better way to even the playing field than to begin enacting piracy against any ships contributing to this disadvantage?
So yeah. Good on them, but the abolition was only PR. Their partner in this was Belgium, and digging into the Belgian Congo and the history of England in Asia might be a good way to gauge the humanitarian intentions.
I think there's room for nuance. British abolitionism, like in other areas, was driven by true believers. Many of them were quakers, and to add even more nuance, while many of them strictly believed slavery was immoral, their preferred solution to free Africans was to ship them back to Africa (Sierre Leone was the notable one, which was a bit of a disaster for complicated reasons) - also what Lincoln believed.
All that being said, Equiano, Wilberfore, More and the rest of the "core" movement really believed in the inherent immorality of slavery, and certainly that the treatment of Blacks in British territories in the west indies was abhorrent.
What you said isn't wrong - it takes two to tango. If the Whigs could be convinced to be abolitionist, you still need the Tories to come along. Geopolitical reasons, the ever-present threat of slave revolts after Tacky's revolt and the revolution in Haiti, and of course the massive payout were good reasons to come along.
Absolutely! Broadly, the champions at home were motivated for all the right reasons, but as you said, two to tango. It just felt like the craven side of this had been neglected by the article.
I think the main thing I got from the article is the scale of it. It's one thing to learn a few important dates in history: the British banned the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in 1834. Ho hum. It's quite another to understand what it took to put that into practice.
It's a lot of lives and resources to spend on "only PR" and they stuck with it for decades. Stopping the slave trade wasn't quick or easy. There was a lot of resistance.
Since we're talking about a worldwide empire, both the good things and bad things about the British empire were happening at enormous scale.