Forms of Slave Trade
Senior 6 · History
Forms of Slave Trade
Lesson 4 of 5
25 min
This print was made by abolitionists to be seen. It shows a real ship, drawn from measurements, with each captive drawn as a small figure in the space the law allowed. Another version of the print, now in the Library of Congress, labels "the stowage of 292 slaves" on the lower deck alone, "130 of these being stowed under the shelves". According to the British Library, the Brookes once carried 609 enslaved men, women and children. Reprinted as a poster, in newspapers and in books, it turned statistics into a picture that no one could forget. Keep it in mind as you study the two questions of this lesson: what did the trade do, and why did it end?
Definition
Abolition: the legal ending of something. Abolition of the slave trade (Britain 1807) banned buying and transporting enslaved people; abolition of slavery or emancipation (British colonies 1833) freed people already enslaved. Do not confuse them.
Abolitionist: a person who campaigned to end the slave trade or slavery.
Underdevelopment: the idea, argued by Walter Rodney, that Africa's economic weakness was produced by its relations with Europe, including the slave trade, rather than being an original condition.
| On Africa | On the Americas and Europe |
|---|---|
| Demographic. About 12.5 million people were taken, most of them young; twice as many men as women were shipped. Demographic historians such as Patrick Manning argue that the population of the regions most affected stagnated or fell between about 1730 and 1850. | Demographic. African people and their descendants became the majority in Brazil and the Caribbean; the African diaspora reshaped the population of the Americas. |
| Political. Predatory states such as Dahomey and Asante grew strong; others, such as the Kongo kingdom, were torn apart by wars fought partly for captives. | Economic. Sugar, coffee, tobacco and cotton made planters and port cities rich: Liverpool, Bristol, Nantes, Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro. |
| Economic. Labour was lost; imported cloth, metal and guns competed with local crafts; exports of people replaced production for the future. | Ideological. Racist ideas were developed to justify enslavement, and they outlived slavery itself. |
| Social. Raids and kidnapping bred insecurity and mistrust between neighbours; legal systems were bent to enslave people for small offences. | Cultural. African music, religion, language and food shaped the cultures of the Americas, from samba to jazz. |
Historians still argue about how deep these effects went. In How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) the Guyanese historian Walter Rodney argued that the trade drained Africa of its most productive people and locked it into a dependent role. Others, such as John Thornton, stress that African states took part on their own terms. Recent economic studies have added evidence: Nathan Nunn (2008) found that the parts of Africa from which the most captives were taken are, on average, among the poorest today.
Worked example
Weighing an effect: the sex ratio. The database records about two men shipped for every woman. What follows? (1) In the source regions, women outnumbered men, so women took on more farm work and marriage patterns changed. (2) In the Americas, the enslaved population often could not grow naturally, so planters kept buying new captives, which kept the trade going. One fact, two effects on two continents: this is the kind of linked reasoning that earns analysis marks.
No single cause ended the trade. The diagram groups the causes into four; the exam question is always which mattered most.
Important
Source analysis: the words of the law. Britain's Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade received royal assent on 25 March 1807. Its central clause reads:
"That from and after the First Day of May One thousand eight hundred and seven, the African Slave Trade, and all and all manner of dealing and trading in the Purchase, Sale, Barter, or Transfer of Slaves, or of Persons intended to be sold, transferred, used, or dealt with as Slaves, practiced or carried on, in, at, to or from any Part of the Coast or Countries of Africa, shall be, and the same is hereby utterly abolished, prohibited, and declared to be unlawful."
Notice two things. The Act abolished the trade, not slavery: the people already enslaved in British colonies stayed enslaved until the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. And the law gives no moral argument; it refers only to "certain Grounds" in Parliament's resolutions of 1806. Enforcement came later, through the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron, treaties with other states and fines of £100 for every enslaved person found on a British ship.
| Year | Step |
|---|---|
| 1791 to 1804 | The Haitian Revolution ends slavery in Saint-Domingue and creates Haiti. |
| 1807 | Britain bans the slave trade (in force 1 May 1807); the United States bans imports from 1 January 1808. |
| 1833 | Britain's Slavery Abolition Act frees enslaved people in most British colonies from 1834. |
| 1848 | France abolishes slavery in its colonies. |
| 1850 | Brazil, the largest destination of all, bans imports of captives. |
| 1865 | The Thirteenth Amendment abolishes slavery in the United States. |
| 1866 | The last voyages counted in the database's estimates. |
| 1888 | Brazil becomes the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery. |
Warning
Three traps. (1) 1807 ended Britain's trade, not slavery. (2) Britain was the largest carrier in the eighteenth century, not over the whole trade: the database credits Portuguese and Brazilian ships with about 5.8 million captives, against about 3.3 million for British ships. (3) Do not tell abolition as a story of white saviours only. The medallion shows a kneeling man asking for help; the Haitian Revolution shows enslaved people freeing themselves.
Tip
Structure an abolition essay as a debate. Paragraph 1: the humanitarian explanation. Paragraph 2: the economic explanation (Williams against Drescher). Paragraph 3: resistance of the enslaved. Paragraph 4: politics and war. Conclusion: which was necessary, which was sufficient, and how they worked together. Name the historians: it shows the examiner you know that history is argued, not only remembered.
CrashCourse, "Haitian Revolutions: Crash Course World History #30". Watch for why the revolution in Saint-Domingue frightened slave-owning governments everywhere, and link it to the "resistance" box in the diagram above.
Practice
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa: the analysis, the factor diagram, the tables, the worked example, the definitions and the exercises. The historians' arguments (Rodney 1972, Thornton, Nunn 2008, Williams 1944, Drescher, Manning) are summarised in Ganzaa's own words.
