Fifty Things You Need To Know About British History by Hugh Williams

Author:Hugh Williams [Williams, Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, General, Ireland, Social Science, Archaeology, 20th Century
ISBN: 9780007309504
Google: qhXfryQLLeQC
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Published: 2008-11-13T01:44:16+00:00

CHAPTER 6

The Abolition of Slavery

1833

Although the slave trade in the British Empire had been formally abolished by the Act of 1807, existing slave ownership was allowed to continue. In 1833, Parliament passed an act that liberated all slaves throughout the Empire, finally destroying a practice that had been at the heart of its economic success for more than two hundred years.

Slavery is a disgusting business. To uproot human beings from their homelands and ship them to plantations thousands of miles away, forcing them to work long hours, depriving them of all basic liberties, and treating them repressively in order to instil obedience, might seem unfathomable to us today. Yet for more than two hundred years that is exactly what British and other European traders did. The majority of their countrymen, regarding it as perfectly acceptable, turned a blind eye. As early as the Elizabethan age the British sailor, Sir John Hawkins, had made big money shipping slave cargoes from West Africa to Spanish settlers in the Caribbean. He was regarded as something of a hero by his contemporaries – not least because he successfully created trading links with the Spanish colonies even though their masters in Madrid strongly disapproved of their relationship with an enemy. Discovery took sailors further afield. Sugar from the West Indies and tobacco from America became staple fare for Europeans. As the plantations grew so did the requirement for cheap labour to keep them going. British ships carried 3 million Africans as slaves between the end of the seventeenth century and the year of formal abolition in 1807. Slaves poured into the colonies bought with bartered goods – guns, cloth and booze – from tribal chiefs and native traders. Always violent, inevitably corrupt, the trade prospered while gentlemen in England puffed their pipes or added another teaspoon of sugar to their tea or coffee.

As the British Empire made its few last steps towards global supremacy, authority and conscience hugged each other in an awkward embrace.

First had come trade, then control, then conscience. Britain’s management of its empire went through each of these phases in turn. To begin with it simply wanted to trade – granting licences to companies to form enterprises abroad from which the mother country would profit. As competition for these international opportunities grew, the British government decided to protect its overseas operations with force. It failed in America, but continued to maintain its hold in India and most of its other territories. Finally, realising that it was master of a huge part of the world, Britain decided that the principles by which its foreign possessions would be governed would, as far as possible, be good British ones. Nothing demonstrates this better than the abolition of slavery: as the British Empire made its few last steps towards global supremacy, authority and conscience hugged each other in an awkward embrace.

A British Prime Minister, talking about the activities of British forces in the West African country of Sierra Leone, said: ‘From the day of their arrival … [they] have helped to bring … hope to a people who have suffered terribly …’.

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