A Brief History of Slavery by Jeremy Black

Author:Jeremy Black [Jeremy Black]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849017329
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2011-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

The last stages of the Atlantic slave trade

The last stages of the slave trade and slavery, as widely understood, invite two separate narratives. On the one hand, there is the Abolitionist narrative, the how and why of the ending of both. On the other, there is room for an emphasis on the continuation of both the slave trade and slavery prior to, or even after, Abolition; indeed, the slave trade and slavery each remained important in the nineteenth century. In part, this situation was a reflection of the limited purchase of liberalism in the Western world (let alone elsewhere), and the strength, instead, of anti-radical sentiment and counter-revolutionary policy in the first half of the nineteenth century,4 but in truth, both continuation and Abolition need to be included in the same narrative, because they cannot be understood apart, as this and the following chapter indicates.

In Europe, the slave trade was abolished first by Denmark in 1792, an abolition that reflected the variety of factors at play in the general process. The key Abolitionist currents were provided by religious pressure and secular idealism, but governmental concern and political calculation were important to timing. Religious pressure was particularly influential in the Protestant world, although there had always also been a significant current of Catholic uneasiness about, and sometimes hostility to, slavery, which can be seen in particular among Spanish religious thinkers in the sixteenth century. Despite some ambiguity about the status of enslaved persons entering Europe, slave trading and slavery were illegal in much of Europe, and had been for some time, which was significant in shaping the norms of public opinion, providing a different dynamic to those of government and business interests. The absence of slavery in Europe was striking in comparison with many other parts of the known world, and contributed to a situation in which slavery lacked normative value for public opinion. In British polite society, by the early 1770s, both slavery and the slave trade were increasingly seen as morally unacceptable.5 An extraordinary number of international relationships and contingent factors came into play, however, to take this situation to the point of ending the slave trade.

In Denmark, the role of government was central in ending the slave trade, and, unlike in Britain, there was no Abolitionist campaign, although the law banning the trade did not come into force until 1803. Also, in the meantime, the slave population in the Danish West Indies (from 1917 the American Virgin Islands) was built up from about 25,000 slaves to about 35,000, which was a comment on the abortive plan to transfer the slaves to the West African base of Fort Christiansberg. In part, Danish Abolition prefigured the situation with most powers over the following century in that it reflected an awareness of the international context. Such concerns were particularly the issue for lesser powers, such as Denmark. It was believed in Denmark that Britain and France would soon abolish the trade and would then seek to prevent other powers from participating, which proved to be an erroneous expectation in the short term.

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