THE SLAVE TRADE

The relationship between Great Britain and the slave trade - not what liberal historians would like you to find out.

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One of the hardest things about history is understanding the attitudes of people in times past, particularly when they are so different to our own. Nowhere is this more apparent than in slavery, and its eventual abolition in Great Britain and the rest of Europe.

By the year 1700, the slave trade had been going on for over a century, and almost every major Western country relied on the money it brought it. Basically it went like this. A ship filled with guns and other goods would sail from a European country to western Africa. There they would buy slaves, normally black men enslaved after being on the losing side in one of the areas many ongoing wars. The slaves would face horrifying conditions as the ship crossed the Atlantic to either the West Indies or the colonies in North America, and many died. There they would be sold in exchange for goods from the colonies that could be sold back in Europe.

No-one quite knows why attitudes started to change in the 1700s. In Great Britain in particular, the ongoing threat from France during the Second Hundred Years' War (1688-1815) made people value their freedom more than before, and the idea of owning another person started to seem old-fashioned. In 1772 Lord Chief Justice Mansfield made a ruling in what became known as the Somersett Case. Somersett was a black slave who had been brought to England by his master and had escaped and been recaptured. Lord Mansfield ruled that, in Great Britain, no man could be owned by another. It was the first nail in slavery's coffin.

One of the greatest anti-slavery campaigners was William Wilberforce, who became an MP aged just 21 in the year 1780. He tried several times to get parliament to outlaw either slavery and/or the slave trade - but he was about to suffer a severe setback. Following the French Revolution in 1789, that country renewed the war with Great Britain in 1792, and any reform was put on hold. Ironically having frustrated reform, it was this same war which ultimately kick-started it.

The war had a brief peace in 1802-3, after which the French under Napoleon finally decided that slavery was a good thing. Of course this meant that the British saw it as a bad thing, and support for its abolition here increased. Great Britain was also fearful that the (mostly) anti-slavery United States might enter the war on France's side, and thus in 1807 both the British and Americans abolished the slave trade. Curiously perhaps they did not abolish slavery, but without the trade to support it, slavery's days were numbered.

You might think that just two countries ending slavery would have little effect - but you'd be very, very wrong! The British in particular were fiercely aggressive in their determination to crush the trade, sending part of their navy for a very expensive patrol off Africa, firing on any ship they even remotely suspected of slave-trading. This annoyed the Americans, who briefly but fruitlessly supported the French, but the two made up after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo (Belgium) in 1815.

Most of the other European countries, however grudgingly, agreed to abolish the slave trade (the British pointedly said they would sink all the ships of any navy that didn't, which 'persuaded' quite a few!). However, rulers in Africa and Arabia refused to stop trading, and encouraged an increase in piracy against European ships. Chief amongst these pirates were the Barbary corsairs, who operated along the Mediterranean Coast. The local rulers refused to stop them - until a fleet of British and American ships turned up unannounced and said they would open fire unless all the pirates surrendered. This 'gunboat diplomacy' worked!

Slavery itself was finally abolished in Great Britain in 1833, though not after much resistance from certain parts of the British Empire. For much of the rest of the 1800s, British and American ships operated their anti-slavery patrols, gradually crushing the African slave trade. It was a mostly British effort; in one ten-year period the British captured or sank 554 ships as against 24 by the Americans. Today, the slave trade goes on in some, mostly Muslim, countries. But the thanks for its destruction in most parts of the world goes to one nation, and one nation above all others. The British!