Trading ships would set sail from Europe with a cargo of manufactured goods to the west coast of Africa. There, these goods would be traded, over weeks and months, for captured people provided by African traders.
European traders found it easier to do business with African intermediaries who raided settlements far away from the African coast and brought those young and healthy enough to the coast to be sold into slavery. Once full, the European trader's ship would depart for the Americas or the Caribbean on the notorious ' Middle Passage '. During this voyage, the slaves would be kept in the ship's hold, crammed close together with little or no space to move.
Conditions were squalid and many people did not survive the voyage. On the final leg of the transatlantic route, European ships returned home with cargoes of sugar, rum, tobacco and other 'luxury' items. It has been estimated that, by the s, , people were enslaved in the British Colonies. The majority of those sold into slavery were destined to work on plantations in the Caribbean and the Americas, where huge areas of the American continent had been colonized by European countries.
But this was not by any means the whole story of anti-slavery. Of vital importance was the large popular protest movement against slavery that emerged across Britain between the s and s, which created a series of petitions that contained hundreds of thousands of signatures.
The sustained pressure from this movement had a lasting impact on the political elite, and made it impossible for the issue to be easily dismissed. What was the basis of this movement? It reflected a new wave of popular ideas, especially a re-interpretation of the Christian duty towards the oppressed, as well as a conviction that restricting the freedom of labour was at odds with economic success.
Such a wave of ideas was, in turn, enabled by the emergence of a national "public opinion", via the growth of newspapers and other types of printed matter, and relatively high levels of literacy. Anti-slavery was striking for the way in which, before modern electronic communications, a mass audience became rapt in events in other parts of the world. Another crucial factor was the struggle of black people to gain their own liberation.
In England, activists such as Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano campaigned against slavery, as part of a community of freed black people in London that already numbered in the tens of thousands. Meanwhile in the Caribbean there was a long history of slave uprisings.
This culminated in with the Sam Sharpe rebellion in Jamaica, reports of which had a direct impact on Parliament's decision to end colonial slavery. For historians, the most controversial issue regarding the demise of the slave trade has been the degree to which economic change itself played a part.
It has been asked, were the British slave plantations of the West Indies already in economic decline before the slave trade and slavery were abolished, and also was the nature of economic development within Britain making the home country less dependent on this area of trade?
In addition, if the slave colonies were becoming less important for the home economy, did this have a discernable effect on politics in Britain, dampening opposition to anti-slavery? Historians are far from reaching a consensus on these matters, with some describing the abolition of the slave trade and slavery as complementary with economic trends, while others see it as "econocide", i. The end of the Atlantic slave trade was not the end of slavery itself.
In the Americas slavery was outlawed finally by all the major states by late s with Brazil being the last to act in , but it continued in North Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean up to the s, and persisted in sub-Saharan Africa during the early twentieth century.
Instances of slavery still remain. The anti-slavery movement was only able to make progress in its goals over a number of generations. But it showed that, through repeated campaigns, it was possible to remould the international economy in line with moral principle. Editor's note : This article was revised on February 25th, to add extra detail to the original version.
What effects did the slave trade have on Africa? How did it develop the Americas? Could Britain have industrialised without the slave trade? Dr Will Hardy assesses the consequences of the Atlantic Slave trade. Slavery did not end with abolition in the 19th century; it still continues today in every country. Take a look at this scenario and decide whether you should prosecute in this interactive quiz This free course, Modern slavery, is designed to develop an understanding of the international system of human rights protection in relation to modern slavery, but also encourage an appreciation of the influence of International Human Rights Law on the development of the domestic system of human rights protection.
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Choose an RSS feed from the list below. The 'Triangular Trade' was the sailing route taken by British slave traders. It was a journey of three stages. A British ship carrying trade goods set sail from Britain, bound for West Africa. At first some people were captured and enslaved directly by the British traders. They ambushed and captured local people in Africa.
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