Historical Note

The 1790s were a tumultuous decade for Great Britain. Even as Enlightenment ideals fostered demands for increased liberty, revolutionary fervor in France pushed Britain into war. Radical thinkers like Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in support of the Rights of Man (and Woman), while publishers of such works faced imprisonment for treason.

In those same years, the British slave trade reached its peak, carrying captives from Africa to places like Antigua, one of the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean Sea. Just twelve miles wide, Antigua was Britain’s third-highest sugar-producing colony, after Jamaica and Barbados. In the late eighteenth century, it had a population of approximately fifty thousand people, 90 percent of whom were enslaved.

Not coincidentally, the movement to abolish slavery also had its origins in that era of conflict and change. Quakers led the charge, aided in their efforts by many individuals: Former slaves, such as Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano, told their stories and captured public sympathy; William Wilberforce campaigned on the matter before Parliament; Granville Sharp helped to found Sierra Leone, an African settlement for free people of African descent who had been enslaved in the British colonies; Thomas Clarkson supported legislative action by conducting research into the horrors of the slave trade; and Josiah Wedgwood mass-produced popular cameos bearing an image of a slave in chains and the motto, “Am I not a Man and a Brother?”

The abolitionists’ work eventually paid off. An 1807 Act of Parliament officially ended the slave trade in the British Empire. Despite the Royal Navy’s enforcement of the act and heavy penalties for its violation, however, smugglers continued the trade on a smaller scale. When Parliament abolished slavery in Britain’s colonies in 1833, they created provisions for gradual emancipation over the course of several years, and included £20 million for compensation to slave owners for their lost “property,” but no reparations for the slaves themselves.