Britain And The Slave Trade | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"But if you want to see if you want to understand why it is that the slave trade is abolished in 1807, then there's a lot else going on besides just a moral campaign. And the debate includes discussion about what's happened in French Saint Domingue, which becomes the independent nation of Haiti in 1804, after a huge slave revolt. Now that's very heavily in the debates that lead to the end of the slave trade in 1807.
And I mean, just briefly to illustrate why this is quite complicated, the sorts of arguments that, combined with the humanitarian arguments by Prime Minister Granville, when he introduces the abolition bill in 1807, is to say, well, it's better that we abolished the slave trade in our empire, because it might help us to avoid the kinds of slave uprisings and revolutions that have torn apart the French Empire that have created the, the Haitian Revolution. In other words, the slave run plantations in the British Empire will be more secure. He argues that they're less likely to experience revolts and revolutions, which he associates with the arrival of new African laborers...
‘Slave Trade was abolished in the British Empire in 1807. But slavery itself carried on for another quarter of a century. Why did it take those extra years before slavery itself was abolished?’
‘The abolition of the slave trade in 1807, as I've suggested, it's about the trade across the Atlantic, but it's not about slavery in the colonies, and whilst a number of abolitionists are looking forward to the time when perhaps slavery itself might be abolished, the intention of the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 is not to act as a stepping stone towards full emancipation.
Parliament when it takes that decision, in fact, is taking a decision to try to shore up and protect the plantations and the institution of slavery. They think that slavery will be more manageable, without the slave trade, that it will somehow be more sustainable to have a system in the colonies whereby planters are encouraged to better look after the enslaved Africans on their plantations without having the slave trade, which of course was constantly replenishing the plantations with with new workers. So the slave trade through the 18th century is a part of the business model of the plantation and it means that planters can accept that they have it written into the way that they do business, that enslaved people will die and that deaths will outnumber births, and that they can rely on the slave trade to, to fill those gaps or to expand their operation.
So the slave trade is part of the slavery business in that sense, and Parliament in 1807, ends the slave trade in the hope that slave holders in the Caribbean will reform the way that the plantations are run, so that enslaved populations become self reproducing, and that slavery will continue, but that it will be different, that it will be more sustainable, less likely to be under, undermined or destroyed by slave rebellions. And that enslaved populations will reproduce themselves and so the planters won't need the slave trade to to do that. So 1807 is about changing slavery. It's not about abolishing slavery. And so Parliament works with that model all the way through until the 1820s.
And in the 1820s under abolitionist pressure, Parliament begins to move towards a policy of gradual abolition, but gradual abolition has no timeframe to it, you know, it could take years or decades… the final ending of slavery in the 1830s is brought about, I would say, by two major transformations, although again, the picture’s complicated by all sorts of other things, but one of those is a radicalization of the abolition movement in Britain.
The other thing is a huge slave rebellion in Jamaica, which really forces the argument. And as the the famous Trinidadian historian, Eric Williams puts it, that the slave rebellion in Jamaica gives Parliament a choice to make: you know, do you want emancipation from above, or emancipation from below? Because this is likely to happen again?...
There is no case in favor of Colston, he didn't do anything good. He's remembered because he gave money, the proceeds of enslavement, murder, exploitation. He gave some of that money to the City of Bristol. And so they put up a statue of him more than 100 years after he died."
The abolition of the slave trade leading to the abolition of slavery is another example of the "myth" of the slippery slope
Apparently philanthropy is "nothing good". There is certainly a chilling effect on modern philanthropists
