Britain's War Against the Slave Trade

Britain's War Against the Slave Trade PDF

Author: Anthony Sullivan

Publisher: Frontline Books

Published: 2020-04-30

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 1526717956

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The true story of the Royal Navy’s sixty-year campaign to stop slavery across the British Empire, decades before the American Civil War. Long before recorded history, men, women and children had been seized by conquering tribes and nations to be employed or traded as slaves. Greeks, Romans, Vikings, and Arabs were among the earliest of many peoples involved in the slave trade, and across Africa the buying and selling of slaves was widespread. There was, at the time, nothing unusual in Britain’s somewhat belated entry into the slave trade, transporting natives from Africa’s west coast to the plantations of the New World. What was unusual was Britain’s decision, in 1807, to ban the slave trade throughout the British Empire. Britain later persuaded other countries to follow suit, but this did not stop this lucrative business. So the Royal Navy went to war against the slavers, in due course establishing the West Africa Squadron, which was based at Freetown in Sierra Leone. This force grew throughout the nineteenth century until a sixth of the Royal Navy’s ships and marines was employed in the battle against the slave trade. Between 1808 and 1860, the West Africa Squadron captured 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans. In Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade, naval historian Anthony Sullivan reveals the story behind this little-known campaign. Whereas Britain is usually, and justifiably, condemned for its earlier involvement in the slave trade, the truth is that in time the Royal Navy undertook a major and expensive operation to end what was, and is, an evil business.

After Abolition

After Abolition PDF

Author: Marika Sherwood

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2007-02-23

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0857710133

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With the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the Emancipation Act of 1833, Britain seemed to wash its hands of slavery. Not so, according to Marika Sherwood, who sets the record straight in this provocative new book. In fact, Sherwood demonstrates that Britain continued to contribute to the slave trade well after 1807, even into the twentieth century. Drawing on government documents and contemporary reports as well as published sources, she describes how slavery remained very much a part of British investment, commerce and empire, especially in funding and supplying goods for the trade in slaves and in the use of slave-grown produce. The nancial world of the City in London also depended on slavery, which - directly and indirectly - provided employment for millions of people. "After Abolition" also examines some of the causes and repercussions of continued British involvement in slavery and describes many of the apparently respectable villains, as well as the heroes, connected with the trade - at all levels of society. It contains important revelations about a darker side of British history, previously unexplored, which will provoke real questions about Britain's perceptions of its past

Bury the Chains

Bury the Chains PDF

Author: Adam Hochschild

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 500

ISBN-13: 9780618619078

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This is the story of a handful of men, led by Thomas Clarkson, who defied the slave trade and ignited the first great human rights movement. Beginning in 1788, a group of Abolitionists moved the cause of anti-slavery from the floor of Parliament to the homes of 300,000 people boycotting Caribbean sugar, and gave a platform to freed slaves.

The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 1814-48

The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 1814-48 PDF

Author: P. Kielstra

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2000-07-25

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 0230288413

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Britain's rarely-examined, nineteenth-century diplomatic efforts for abolition took contemporary pre-eminence over most questions and almost sparked war with France in 1845. Kielstra examines the issue in Anglo-French relations: how conflicting moral, economic, and nationalist pressures and lobby groups affected domestic politics and high diplomacy. To preserve peace and their positions, statesmen had little margin for error as they framed policies which attacked the trade and satisfied mutually incompatible domestic opinions, in a struggle which holds lessons for current efforts to include human rights concerns in foreign policy.

Crossings

Crossings PDF

Author: James Walvin

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2013-10-15

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1780232047

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We all know the story of the slave trade—the infamous Middle Passage, the horrifying conditions on slave ships, the millions that died on the journey, and the auctions that awaited the slaves upon their arrival in the Americas. But much of the writing on the subject has focused on the European traders and the arrival of slaves in North America. In Crossings, eminent historian James Walvin covers these established territories while also traveling back to the story’s origins in Africa and south to Brazil, an often forgotten part of the triangular trade, in an effort to explore the broad sweep of slavery across the Atlantic. Reconstructing the transatlantic slave trade from an extensive archive of new research, Walvin seeks to understand and describe how the trade began in Africa, the terrible ordeals experienced there by people sold into slavery, and the scars that remain on the continent today. Journeying across the ocean, he shows how Brazilian slavery was central to the development of the slave trade itself, as that country tested techniques and methods for trading and slavery that were successfully exported to the Caribbean and the rest of the Americas in the following centuries. Walvin also reveals the answers to vital questions that have never before been addressed, such as how a system that the Western world came to despise endured so long and how the British—who were fundamental in developing and perfecting the slave trade—became the most prominent proponents of its eradication. The most authoritative history of the entire slave trade to date, Crossings offers a new understanding of one of the most important, and tragic, episodes in world history.

Slavery and the British Empire

Slavery and the British Empire PDF

Author: Kenneth Morgan

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0191566276

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This is an introduction to the entire history of British involvement with slavery and the slave trade, which especially focuses on the two centuries from 1650, and covers the Atlantic world, especially North America and the West Indies, as well as the Cape Colony, Mauritius, and India. -;Slavery and the British Empire provides a clear overview of the entire history of British involvement with slavery and the slave trade, from the Cape Colony to the Caribbean. The book combines economic, social, political, cultural, and demographic history, with a particular focus on the Atlantic world and the plantations of North America and the West Indies from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. Kenneth Morgan analyses the distribution of slaves within the empire and how this changed over time; the world of merchants and planters; the organization and impact of the triangular slave trade; the work and culture of the enslaved; slave demography; health and family life; resistance and rebellions; the impact of the anti-slavery movement; and the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807 and of slavery itself in most of the British empire in 1834. As well as providing the ideal introduction to the history of British involvement in the slave trade, this book also shows just how deeply embedded slavery was in British domestic and imperial history - and just how long it took for British involvement in slavery to die, even after emancipation. -;...a clear overview of the entire history of British involvement with slavery and the slave trade - Spartacus Review

The Black Joke

The Black Joke PDF

Author: A.E. Rooks

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2022-01-18

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1982128267

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"The most feared ship in Britain's West Africa Squadron, His Majesty's brig Black Joke was one of a handful of ships tasked with patrolling the western coast of Africa in an effort to end hundreds of years of global slave trading. Sailing after the spectacular fall of Napoleon in France, yet before the rise of Queen Victoria's England, Black Joke was first a slaving vessel itself, and one with a lightning-fast reputation; only a lucky capture in 1827 allowed it to be repurposed by the Royal Navy to catch its former compatriots. Over the next five years, the ship's diverse crew and dedicated commanders would capture more ships and liberate more enslaved people than any other in the Squadron. Author A.E. Rooks chronicles the adventures on this ship and its crew in a narrative of the history of Britain's suppression efforts. As Britain slowly attempted to snuff out the transatlantic slave trade by way of treaty and negotiation, enforcing these policies fell to the Black Joke and those that sailed with it as they battled slavers, weather disasters, and interpersonal drama among captains and crew that reverberated across oceans. In this history of the daring feats of a single ship, the abolition of the international slave trade is revealed as an inexplicably extended exercise involving tense negotiations between many national powers, both colonizers and formerly colonized, that would stretch on for decades longer than it should have"--

The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law

The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law PDF

Author: Jenny S. Martinez

Publisher: OUP USA

Published: 2012-01-04

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0195391624

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There is a broad consensus among scholars that the idea of human rights was a product of the Enlightenment but that a self-conscious and broad-based human rights movement focused on international law only began after World War II. In this book, the nineteenth century's absence is conspicuous - few have considered that era seriously, much less written books on it. But as this author shows, the foundation of the movement that we know today was a product of one of the nineteenth century's central moral causes: the movement to ban the international slave trade.