So I'm taking the last of my undergrad history courses right now, and one of the books that my professor assigned us is Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains. We're six chapters in, and so far, Hochschild has centered British abolitionists (primarily Thomas Clarkson) in his accounting of the outlawing of the slave trade in England (I phrase it that way because we all, I assume, know that slavery itself didn't go anywhere after 1833).
Now, I might not be the best read Marxist, but I know enough to be skeptical of any claims of significant historical events being driven by the energy and moral force of "great" individuals rather than the ebb and flow of material reality, a claim Hochschild is definitely making here. He even quotes Emerson in saying "An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man."
Well! I couldn't let that nonsense go unargued, and since lambasting my professor would do no good, I'm here to ask if anybody happens to know the actual reasons the slave trade was outlawed, beyond vagaries about the industrial revolution and wage slavery. Gimme the real nuts and bolts.
While this was not the sole reason, it should be noted that English anti-slavery laws gave their navy a pretext to board and search vessels for "inspections". With the UK quickly becoming the world's dominant naval power, this gave them lots of power over foreign shipping and trade, especially in the Atlantic.
It allowed them to intercept ships to check if they were slave trading. While they were inspecting the ship, the British officers could use the pretext to find other things wrong, ie smuggling, piracy, desertion, ect. Then they could seize your property or arrest you in some cases. Sort of like how American cops can use a busted taillight to pull you over, then arrest you if he find drugs during that.
The navy did also free a significant number of slaves this way too so it wasn't just an abuse of power, but it also signaled to everyone that Britain was the dominant naval power in Europe now.
beyond vagaries about the industrial revolution and wage slavery
That was probably it, right? Experience with factories showed that you could work people to death for a pittance, AND make it their problem to feed and clothe themselves.
The market had cooled off - enslaved populations were big enough in the New World to sustain themselves, which is why they felt comfortable banning the trade (but not the practice) decades earlier. Slavery wasn't popular at home with religious folks, and there was an expensive revolt in Jamaica that was probably the proximate cause. They had new sources of cheap labor in India that they could export to the colonies (see: Trinidad) under the wage model. So by that point there wasn't any reason to keep it.
I could've phrased that better, what I meant was I know those were the culprits, but I was hoping to pick this comm's brains for details. Which you've just provided a bit of, so thank you!
I believe it was because Britain needed the manpower to stay in Africa since imperialism there was starting to ramp up, even though the scramble for Africa doesn’t officially begin until decades later. Gerald Horne also argues that abolishing slavery was a way to undermine the USA.
“Both openly and by implication, all the European powers in the nineteenth century indicated their awareness of the fact that the activities connected with producing captives were inconsistent with other economic pursuits. That was the time when Britain in particular wanted Africans to collect palm produce and rubber and to grow agricultural crops for export in place of slaves; and it was clear that slave raiding was violently conflicting with that objective in Western, Eastern, and Central Africa.”
— How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney
Also Hoschild is a lib.
My understanding was that there was enormous public support for the abolition movement in Britain, to a degree that it would've flipped the majority party in the UK. Keep in mind that this was the same time Napoleon was active in Europe, so having a united home front was extremely important for the British government.
when the US colonies became independent the money against the pro-abolition moralists mostly evaporated. the cause of expansion & preservation of slavery was now being litigated across the atlantic, with much more limited stakes in Britain. i'd say yeah, advocacy groups can actually influence policy, particularly when the economic component of the question isn't as important. but british abolitionists were definitely not 'shadows of one man' or an allegiance that agreed on much outside that particular issue
another component would be fucking with the imperial competition. the british basically gave themselves carte blanche to attack & board any boat in west africa, and while assuredly this caught many slavers, it was probably more important to them that they got to halt or interfere with foreign trade at their pleasure
https://aeon.co/essays/the-british-empire-was-built-on-slavery-then-grew-by-antislavery
"The campaigns against the slave trade and slavery aligned well with the interests of an industrial and capitalist British Empire. The end of slavery and the beginning of free labour, the leaders of the antislavery movement promised, would secure rebellious Caribbean subjects to British rule. The discipline of wage labour would be a civilising force, teaching thrift and forbearance to people who were believed to be mired in moral and economic depravity."
"As the Trinidadian historian, later first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Eric Williams argued in Capitalism and Slavery (1944), in the era of abolition, economic conditions favoured cheap, easily exploited wage labour over enslaved labour. Antislavery Britons believed in justice and freedom, and enjoyed how their beliefs made them feel. But what justice and freedom meant, and Britain’s responsibility to carry them around the world by force, if necessary, were shaped by imperial power. The public celebrated. Parliament made the laws, and capital called the tune."
The Slavery Abolition Act was enacted in August 1833 because there was a massive slave revolt in Jamaica less than two years earlier, which took obvious inspiration from the triumph of the Haitian Revolution which culminated in the complete liquidation of the slaveowner class by the slave class. At the end of the day, slavery was abolished because it turns out slaves fucking hated slavery and would do anything to end their subjugation, up to and including slitting their masters' throats at night and burning down their plantations. Slavery held on in the US because the antebellum South had a demographic advantage relative to the Caribbean, where the slaves vastly outnumbered the nonslave population.
One of the arguments that Horne makes in The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America Arr! } is that London was being forced to rely on Africans as soldiers in order to maintain their territory in the Caribbean. IIRC, Paris and Madrid had already been using freed slaves as soldiers as well as agitating slave rebellions in the US, so it wasn't necessarily a moral thing, but "Employer competition" type thing. But also, there was a general distaste of slavers in England thanks to the growing distaste for the colonies. Revolution and whatnot. Also also, Somerset v Stewart shouldn't be overlooked as it did spawn some copycats that would probably have contributed to the culture regarding slavery.
I've got that book, perhaps I should've read it before making this post lol. I'll definitely be going through it for citations when I inevitably deconstruct Bury the Chains. My professor has been heaping praise on it this whole term, so I'm sure that'll make me popular.
It's an interesting read. There's a couple of claims I've wanted to look more into like that there was legislation discussed in British parliament towards abolition specifically to snub the Americas, and that early freedom of religion was in response to Bacon's rebellion, iirc. But overall, the amount of info on rebellions and uprisings was fascinating. But also overwhelming.😅 It's one of those books that could benefit from like an interactive map or something.
Others have given good reasons materially, but we shouldn't ignore that there really was a mass anti-slavery movement in Britain with an idealist base. and that those people do deserve praise.
People do decide what to do with the restrictied material options given them, and here they chose to abolish slavery, when other, more horrible, options for resolving this contradiction existed (See US Post-Reconstruction for instance, for how to somehow manage to do it worse than England's piecemeal, flawed, incomplete abolition of slavery.)
Slave revolts are expensive, especially in the Caribbean, also Americans took over the slave trade
