THE SLAVE TRADE
Many countries and societies in history enslaved others in the past: the Romans, the Vikings, the Ottomans, the Chinese and the Incan empires to name a few. But until the British began enslaving African people in the seventeenth century, slaves were usually people captured in battle or conquest.
African enslavement was different. It was we British who modernised and industrialised the buying and selling of people to work in the hot climates of our new colonies in the Caribbean and North America. It meant that huge fortunes were made by a few individual plantation owners, as workers did not have to be paid; slave owners could work men, women and children to death and just import new ones when they were needed. Enslaved people worked growing sugar cane, tobacco and, in North America, cotton. Walking round the streets of any big town in Britain today you can see the profits that came from the enslavement of millions of people over two hundred years. Art galleries – the Tate Modern and Tate Britain in London for example – and many fine country houses across the country were built using money that came from slave labour.
The slave system was made out to be a good thing to the ordinary British people. After all, argued the slave owners and traders, black Africans were not as intelligent, were not even as human, as white Europeans. This was, of course, all lies. But it kept the trade going and the money rolling in. It wasn’t just the slave owners who profited, many industries flourished through the free labour including shipbuilding and gun manufacturing.
The public mood began to change after a series of important trials brought the treatment of slaves to the world’s attention. One of these trials was that of the Zong – one of the most important turning points in the battle to end slavery. It meant that conditions on slave ships were printed in newspapers, talked about in churches and chapels, in coffee houses and pubs all across the country. Artists painted pictures about it, books and articles were written about it. Ordinary people began to see slavery for the inhumane trade it was. Some of the arguments and discussions in this story are based on real quotes from the Zong trial, and some have been simplified or imagined.
Eventually the actions of organizations like the Sons of Africa, and white abolitionists like Granville Sharp, John Clarkson, and later William Wilberforce, meant the government had to act.
The British trade in slaves was abolished in 1807, but the slaves in the colonies, like Jamaica, were not freed until 1833. There was a massive outcry among the slave owners. Not just plantation owners, but many middle-class Britons who invested in enslaved people as absentee owners: they used their money to invest in and buy enslaved people that they never saw or met, but whose labour directly profited them.
There was a massive backlash. No one wanted to lose money, so the British Government paid out compensation. The more slaves you owned the more money you received. The son of our former prime minister David Cameron’s great-great uncle received what would amount to £3 million in today’s money, for the two hundred and two slaves he owned.
The enslaved people received nothing. Not one penny. But at least they were free.
Slavery was not abolished in America until 1865, and not until 1888 in Brazil. During the three hundred years of the international slave trade, so many enslaved people were thrown overboard, dead and alive on what was called the Middle Passage that to this day, sharks follow the route of those ships, looking for more people to eat.