Shutting the Slave Market [15min]

Once they had decided to do so, the British took half a century to stop slavery in the Empire. Planters had to be compensated. Special medals were minted and ladies sewed samplers to mark the passing of the Imperial slave trade. "This Sceptred Isle: Empire" is a narrative history of the British Empire from Ireland in the 12th century to the independence of India in the 20th, told in 90 programmes written by historian Christopher Lee and narrated by actor Juliet Stevenson. (You may listen again online to the five most recent episodes of "Empire".)

The high time of British slaving started with the activities of John Hawkins sponsored by Elizabeth I in the 16th century to the patronage of the future James II as a governor of the Royal Africa Company (1672) that sold 90,000 black slaves into the Americas. By the 1700s Britain was the biggest slave trader in Europe and within the treaties of Utrecht (1713-14) the British had exclusive rights to slaving across the Atlantic. By the 1760s a ship full of slaves was leaving a British port every other day. In the 1770s the mood changed partly due to the Mansfield Judgment (see below). Also the anti-slavery movement came at a time when the decline in the West Indian sugar market made slaves too expensive.

By the 1780s the sugar industry in the West Indies was certainly in decline and slaves, sometimes costing £200 each, were too uneconomical labour. Sugar production costs had increased over 20 years or so by 75%. Slave prices in the same period had risen on average by 140%. Sugar prices were falling and so the economics no longer made sense especially to absentee landlords wanting to spend their money in Britain instead of modernising their plantations.

In 1788 (the year the first convicts were sent to Australia) more than 100 anti-slavery petitions were presented to Parliament. In 1789 a freed slave Olaudah Equiano, published what were claimed to be his memoirs, The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa, The African. It was a best seller. The mood for change and the economics were coinciding.