British Abolition Act
Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act on 25 March 1807, prohibiting British subjects from carrying enslaved people across the Atlantic, after a campaign of twenty years. Britain had been the largest carrier in the world, moving something over three million people in the eighteenth century, and Liverpool, Bristol and London had built substantial parts of their wealth on it. The campaign that ended it invented much of modern political organising. The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, founded in 1787, was largely Quaker with Anglican leadership; Thomas Clarkson rode some 35,000 miles collecting evidence from sailors and surgeons and assembling the boxes of shackles, thumbscrews and branding irons he showed at meetings; Josiah Wedgwood produced the kneeling-figure medallion; and the diagram of the slave ship Brookes, showing 482 bodies packed on a plan, was reprinted in the tens of thousands. Petitions reached hundreds of thousands of signatures, and a sugar boycott drew perhaps 300,000 households. William Wilberforce introduced abolition bills almost annually from 1791 and lost each time. What finally carried it was a combination of the loss of Saint-Domingue to the Haitian revolution, which showed what the system produced; the death of Pitt and the arrival of a ministry willing to whip for it; and a tactical act of 1806 banning trade with foreign colonies, which killed two-thirds of the traffic before the main vote. The final vote was 283 to 16. Slavery itself in the British colonies continued until 1833. The Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron then spent sixty years intercepting slavers, seizing some 1,600 ships. Britain also paid Spain and Portugal to abolish their trades, and compensated slaveowners rather than the enslaved in 1833.
- Year: 1807 CE
- Category: Political
