THE ABOLITION OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE:
Origins, Effects, and Legacies
A Guide for Teachers
Prepared by Ted Maris-Wolf
Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
Williamsburg, Virginia
©2009 Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
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Front Cover Text
The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Origins serve as an educational
supplement to “The bloody Writing is for ever torn,” a film that documents
the international conference convened in Ghana in 2007 by the Omohundro
Institute of Early American History and Culture. Divided into three
chapters, The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade combines footage from
the conference with historical images and modern photographs to introduce
students to the complex issues facing historians of slavery and the Atlantic
slave trade.
©2009 Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
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THE ABOLITION OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE
CHAPTER I
—ORIGINS—
Did the early efforts to abolish the reprehensible commerce in human beings result from some sort of transformation in European
morality? Or were less humanitarian, self-serving motives involved? Might it have been the actions of the enslaved themselves that
spurred efforts to end the Atlantic slave trade?
CHAPTER SUMMARY
Though historians agree that profound changes in the Atlantic world combined to alter the Atlantic slave trade
significantly by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, scholars often disagree on the causes and the very
nature of these developments.
Many historians of abolition and the slave trade agree with English philosopher John Stuart Mill’s observation that “the
spread of moral convictions could sometimes take precedence over material interests.”1 These scholars argue that
abolitionism was a product of a new morality—a primarily humanitarian impulse—that drove reformers to mobilize
themselves in new ways and demand an end to the slave trade.
Other scholars argue that it was the revolution on the Caribbean island of Saint Domingue (now Haiti), as well as other
rebellions and insurrections of enslaved Africans in the New World, that persuaded Europeans to look elsewhere for
profits and production. These historians recognize that Danish, British, or American legislation did not end the Atlantic
slave trade and that the commerce continued and even increased through the mid-nineteenth century. There are also
those who insist that the slave trade has never ended but merely changed in form and character.2
Here, in Chapter I, three historians present their views on why and how England ended its participation in the Atlantic
slave trade. Philip D. Morgan, of Johns Hopkins University, argues that a moral revolution occurred in Britain in the late
eighteenth century. Unlike many periods of radical change in history, this upheaval took place largely within the minds of
individuals. As a result, many British citizens experienced spiritual and intellectual transformations that led them to
empathize increasingly with victims of the Atlantic slave trade and New World slavery.
Seymour Drescher, of the University of Pittsburgh, examines the practical workings of this moral revolution and how
abolitionists were able to mobilize themselves in innovative ways that challenged British citizens to become involved in a
cause larger than themselves. New networks of communication, forged by newspapers and petitions, were key to the
abolitionists’ success in transforming national opinion into opposition to the slave trade, according to Drescher.
Rejecting most of the claims made by Morgan and Drescher, Claudius Fergus, of the University of the West Indies, St.
Augustine, contends that revolutionary emancipationism among the enslaved populations of the Caribbean brought
about the early nineteenth-century efforts to end the Atlantic slave trade. By the 1790s, enslaved Africans sought to
undermine plantation slavery by rebelling against their masters throughout the Caribbean and overthrowing the slave
system. The heavy casualties the new movement inflicted on European powers, especially Britain, Fergus argues,
eventually made abolitionism a preferable alternative to continued warfare in the Caribbean.
1
Quoted in David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford, 2006), 238.
2
Another interpretation not featured in this video contends that larger economic developments rather than a moral transformation brought about the
end of the Atlantic slave trade (and New World slavery). Scholars who advocate this position argue that by the 1790s, New World slavery had become
less efficient and profitable, giving rise to an industrial revolution in Europe largely funded by the profits from the slave trade. For the first—and
perhaps most articulate— explanation of this thesis, see Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery; With a New Introduction by Colin A. Palmer (Chapel Hill,
N.C., 1994).
©2009 Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
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Understand the complex and contested origins of abolition.
Understand the process through which historians disagree and communicate their ideas.
Understand the transformation in British society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as
well as the historical arguments made for a moral revolution and new mobilization as causes of
abolitionism.
Understand the geography of the Caribbean.
Understand the role of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean in the 1790s in challenging New World slavery.
Understand the historical argument of revolutionary emancipationism as chief cause of initial efforts to
abolish the slave trade.
TOPICS FOR LECTURES AND DISCUSSIONS
Discuss the different arguments for abolition and why historians disagree about how change occurred in
the past.
How do we know when a society is changing? What do historians look for as evidence for change, within
people’s minds and within a society at large?
Discuss the role of technology and communication in the workings of the abolitionist movement.
What is a “movement” in history, and how do historians identify a movement’s beginning and end?
Why, in Britain, were cups, plates, and sugar bowls produced bearing various abolitionist mottos and
images? How effective were such propaganda techniques?
Discuss Toussaint Louverture and the significance of the revolution in Saint Domingue (now Haiti) to
Atlantic history.
Discuss ways in which enslaved Africans sought to undermine the New World slave system in the late
eighteenth century, including flight, maroonage, rebellion, and revolution.
©2009 Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
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Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810 (London, 1976).
Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006).
Selwyn Carrington, The Sugar Industry and the Abolition of the Slave Trade (Gainesville, Fla., 2002).
Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh, 1977); From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise
and Fall of Atlantic Slavery (London, 1999).
Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2004); A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and
Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004).
Stanley L. Engerman and Barbara Lewis Solow, eds., British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams (Cambridge,
2004).
David P. Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution on the Atlantic World (Columbia, S.C., 2001).
Philip Gould, Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass., 2003).
Judith Jennings, The Business of Abolishing the British Slave Trade (London, 1997).
J. R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Antislavery: The Mobilization of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1787–1807 (London, 1998).
©2009 Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
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THE ABOLITION OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE
CHAPTER II:
—EFFECTS —
How effectively were policies against the slave trade implemented, and how far-reaching and lasting was their impact? How were the
everyday lives of those living in Africa, Europe, and the Americas altered by attempts to end the Atlantic slave trade?
CHAPTER SUMMARY
From 1500 to 1800, the Atlantic slave trade transported approximately ten million Africans to the Americas, remaking
the social, political, and economic worlds of the Atlantic in the process. For hundreds of years, African coastal and
inland societies evolved in ways that alternately complemented and challenged the unflagging European and American
demand for enslaved labor. In the New World, enslaved communities in North and South America, as well as in the
Caribbean, developed vibrant cultures that creatively resisted the brutal pressures of coercion while preserving key
elements of a shared heritage. The rise of the plantation complex and the transatlantic slave trade wove four disparate
continents into one Atlantic world.
The efforts to abolish the Atlantic slave trade after 1807 brought about yet another massive transformation in the
communities and institutions of Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Though the effects of the abolitionist campaign were
widespread, an end to the transatlantic trade proved uneven and, in most cases, gradual. The trade in human beings from
Africa to the Americas did not cease upon the passage of abolitionist legislation in 1807, nor did it diminish consistently,
without sporadic periods of resurgence. European and American enforcement of abolitionist measures faced numerous
obstacles, including mutual mistrust of one another’s naval forces, noncooperation and noncompliance of various other
nations, and innovations in slave smuggling along the African coast and on the high seas. In the years between 1807 and
1867, more than two million slaves were transported across the Atlantic.
In sub-Saharan Africa, as well as in the Americas, the abolition of the transatlantic trade drastically altered politics,
economics, demography, and social relations in those areas that had either supplied or received vast numbers of slaves in
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Here, in Chapter II, historians illuminate the ways in which attempts
to abolish the slave trade affected four vast regions of the Atlantic world—South-Central Africa, the Gold Coast, the
Bight of Biafra, and the United States.
David Gordon, of Bowdoin College, explores the dramatic consequences of England’s action in 1807 on South-Central
Africa, a region that had included two of the largest slave supply zones in the transatlantic trade, Kongo and Angola.
For Gordon, the effects of 1807 are clear: British patrolling in the North Atlantic drove Portuguese and Brazilian slave
merchants south. This shift coincided with British investment in so-called legitimate trade in new Atlantic ports in
western Angola, such as Cabinda and Benguela. It also brought about regional changes in the nature of dependency and
slavery and in political leadership, spurred an increase in warfare, and provided an impetus for urban settlement.
By comparison, David Richardson, of the University of Hull, examines the effects of legislation against the Atlantic slave
trade on people who lived along the Gold Coast, in West Africa. He concludes that the inhabitants of slave supply zones
experienced a shock soon after 1807, as half their trade vanished with the slave ships. The political reorganization that
involved centralized states in the interior and coastal peoples after abolition resulted from the sudden disruption in longestablished patterns of commerce.
Focusing on the nearby Bight of Biafra region, David Northrup, of Boston College, sees another form of adjustment
among inhabitants of previous slave supply zones. Northrup argues that a brisk commerce in palm oil quickly
supplanted the now-defunct trade in slaves, prompting the creation of new inland producers who cultivated and
processed palm oil in family settings using free labor. In Northrup’s view, the absence of centralized states in the interior
(unlike the Gold Coast) allowed the peoples of the Bight of Biafra to adapt quickly and effectively to a legitimate system
of exchange that contributed to an overall increase in imports to the region after 1807.
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While Gordon, Richardson, and Northrup focus on areas that supplied slaves for the transatlantic trade, Steven Deyle,
of the University of Houston, examines the effects of legislation against the Atlantic slave trade on a region that had
received slaves. Deyle contends that the United States’ decision to stop importing slaves in 1808 served as a critical
turning point in its history by accelerating and amplifying a domestic version in which commercial traders transported
hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the upper to the lower South. The result, according to Deyle, was an
ominous shift in the dynamics of power: states in the upper South, especially Virginia, found their political significance
diminished, while the strength of the lower South grew steadily. Deyle concludes that this new political alignment
eventually led to the American Civil War.
©2009 Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
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Understand the concept of an Atlantic world and the interconnections among Africa, Europe, and the Americas in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
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Understand the varied and wide-ranging effects of the efforts to implement legislative measures against the Atlantic slave
trade on African, European, and American societies.
Understand the process through which historians communicate their ideas with one another.
Understand the geography of sub-Saharan Africa.
Understand political, economic, and cultural differences among three regions of sub-Saharan Africa.
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Understand the workings and significance of the domestic slave trade in the United States.
TOPICS FOR LECTURES AND DISCUSSIONS
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Do turning points exist in history? Was 1807 a turning point in Atlantic world history? Why or why not?
How did the decisions made by Parliament in 1807 and the United States Congress in 1808 affect enslaved peoples in subSaharan Africa, North America, the Caribbean, and South America?
What was the relationship between the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and the abolition of slavery itself in the Atlantic
world?
Discuss the changes experienced in the Gold Coast, Bight of Biafra, and South-Central Africa after 1807.
Discuss the relationship between the trade in slaves and so-called legitimate commerce in the nineteenth century.
Discuss the connection between efforts to end the Atlantic slave trade and the rise of the domestic slave trade in the United
States.
FURTHER READING
Edward A. Alpers, Ivory and Slaves: Changing Pattern of International Trade in East Central Africa to the Later Nineteenth Century (Berkeley,
Calif., 1975).
Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1998).
Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York, 2005).
Robert H. Gudmestad, A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade (Baton Rouge, La., 2003).
David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1987).
David Eltis and James Walvin, eds., The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Origins and Effects in Europe, Africa, and the Americas
(Madison, Wis., 1981).
Warren S. Howard, American Slavers and the Federal Law, 1837–1862 (Berkeley, Calif., 1963).
Allen F. Isaacman and Barbara S. Isaacman, Slavery and Beyond: The Making of Men and Chikunda Ethnic Identities in the Unstable World of
South-Central Africa, 1750–1920 (Portsmouth, N.H., 2004).
Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass., 1999).
Robin Law, From Slave Trade to “Legitimate” Commerce: The Commercial Transition in 19th-Century West Africa (Cambridge, 1995).
Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, 2d ed. (New York, 2000).
©2009 Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
W I L L I A M S B U R G ,
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THE ABOLITION OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE
CHAPTER III
—LEGACIES—
What are the legacies of the Atlantic slave trade in African, European, and American life today? How is enslavement remembered, especially in
Africa, and has it really been abolished? Or does it continue even today, in changed forms? What obligations do the living have toward the
descendants of the enslaved?
CHAPTER SUMMARY
Historians continue to explore the myriad ways in which the effects and memory of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade
influence the present. In recent years scholars have increasingly examined how individuals, communities, tourism boards,
and governments remember—or choose to represent—slavery and the slave trade to others. One focus of such research
is on the legacies of this traumatic past, “where,” according to Yale historian David Blight, “past and present connect.”1 3
It is these linkages between present and past, the living and the dead, with which the scholars in Chapter III are primarily
engaged. Perhaps more than in any other area of historical inquiry today, these scholars of slavery and the slave trade
find themselves straddling multiple spheres—academe, politics, public service, human rights, and international
development. For many, their main interest includes a self-conscious examination of how their own historical research
intersects with the larger social, political, and emotional realities of the present. Here, they debate how history should be
written and for what purpose.
Elisée Soumonni, of the University of Abomey-Calavi in Benin, begins by encouraging fellow historians to claim an
active role in challenging any interpretations of the past that have been based more upon political or economic
motivations than upon critical, rigorous research.
Sandra Greene, of Cornell University, links past forms of slavery in sub-Saharan Africa to trokosi, a modern form of
slavery that still flourished in Ghana in the 1990s.
Apex A. Apeh, of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, argues that even where slavery ceases to exist, the inequality created
by past systems of involuntary servitude persists. Apeh contends that although servitude is no longer hereditary, identity
as a descendant of slaves is.
Kodzo Gavua, of the University of Ghana, explores the dynamics of the internal African diaspora created by the
transatlantic slave trade and the efforts of modern-day Ghanaians to reconstruct their family histories and locate family
members separated by the commerce in human beings.
Lonnie G. Bunch, of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture,
discusses the power of memory in forging individual, group, and national identities. Bunch highlights the challenges
confronting the historian who is charged with the difficult task of navigating responsibly through the conflicting
pressures of collective memory and present-day politics.
Ira Berlin, of the University of Maryland, College Park, inquires into the meaning and significance of 1807 to Africans,
Europeans, and Americans. For slaves, Berlin explains, 1807 was a moment of celebration, a celebration that largely
proved to be premature, as the transatlantic slave trade continued in various forms for another sixty years.
Oliver Patterson, of New York University, insists that the two-hundredth anniversary of the British abolition of the
Atlantic slave trade offers an occasion for somber reflection, rather than celebration. He urges scholars to do more to
recognize the achievements of those who fell victim to—but resisted—the brutality of the Middle Passage and New
World slavery.
3
David Blight, opening remarks, Session 12, “‘The bloody Writing is for ever torn’: Domestic and International Consequences of the First
Governmental Efforts to Abolish the Atlantic Slave Trade,” a conference sponsored by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and
Culture in Accra and Elmina, Ghana, August 8–12, 2007; see conference footage at: http://oieahc.wm.edu/conferences/ghana/sessions.html.
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Joseph Agbakoba, of the University of Nigeria, ponders the dilemma of reparations for wrongs committed during the
Atlantic slave trade. Who, he asks, should receive reparations? In Africa, where slavery was, in many cases, a state
enterprise, who were the victims and who collaborated? How would historians, lawyers, or government leaders go
about differentiating between historical oppressors and victims, let alone their descendants? For Agbakoba, such
questions pose great obstacles to those who seek reparations for past wrongs, especially in Africa.
Joseph Akawu Ushie, of the University of Uyo, Nigeria, also stresses the complexity of the slave trade in Africa and the
problem of African complicity in the internal trade of slaves from inland areas to the coast. He argues, however, that
African participation in the slave trade must be understood not simply as a matter of state involvement in the capture
and sale of human beings but also in terms of power and the decisions individual African leaders made on their own to
participate in the notorious traffic.
Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, of Ghana’s University of Cape Coast, calls for a new direction in research on
slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. She insists that determined scholars can unearth the voices of the enslaved,
rarely heard in traditional histories until now.
Irene K. Odotei, of the University of Ghana and the Historical Society of Ghana, differentiates between legal or physical
emancipation and emancipation of the mind. Though slavery and the slave trade have largely been abolished, the legacies
of both continue to influence the attitudes, assumptions, and worldviews of descendants, both of the oppressors and of
the enslaved, living today. Odotei explains that her views have evolved considerably over the years. In the notorious
dungeons of Elmina and Cape Coast slave castles, she had previously seen only the history of victims, whose lives were
damaged—if not completely destroyed— by enslavement. Now, she understands the strength of those who endured
enslavement, the Middle Passage, and sale in the New World and kept their culture and identities alive through stories
and a resilient spirit. Odotei centers in particular on the struggles and triumphs of enslaved women, who passed their
traditions on to their children. She explains that if societies are to heal the wounds left by a painful past, the experiences
responsible for that history must be truthfully recognized and reinforced by the hope and fortitude of those who have
survived. Odotei concludes by asking if some variation of the tragedies and horrors of long ago might be repeating
themselves, perhaps silently, in homes, neighborhoods, or nations today.
©2009 Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
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Understand the variety and intensity of discussion and debate among historians based in Africa, Europe, and the Americas
concerning the legacies of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade.
Understand the process through which historians relate (or avoid relating) their historical research to present-day concerns.
Understand the ways in which present-day concerns affect the writing of the past and how legacies of the Atlantic slave
trade influence everyday life for those in Africa, Europe, and the Americas.
Understand how the memory and history of the transatlantic slave trade are represented in various sub-Saharan African
societies in art, architecture, and tourist sites.
Understand the significance of the internal African diaspora created by the transatlantic slave trade and its legacies today.
Understand the role of enslaved women in preserving collective memory and identity throughout the Atlantic world.
TOPICS FOR LECTURES AND DISCUSSIONS
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What is the relationship between memory and history? Is there a difference between collective memory and history?
How have African, European, and American societies chosen to remember the Atlantic slave trade and slavery? What role
should the historian play in this remembering?
What is a legacy? Discuss the legacies of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in Africa, Europe, and the Americas today.
When did the transatlantic slave trade end? What brought about its final demise?
What is meant by reparations, and are they an appropriate solution for healing the wounds of the past?
If reparations were to be given to descendants of those affected by the Atlantic slave trade, who would provide the
reparations and who should receive them?
Can inequality today be explained by events of the past? How does the historian go about identifying causes or roots of
modern-day conditions or problems? Is this the proper role of the historian?
Is it possible to ignore present-day concerns when researching and writing history, or, as James Baldwin insisted, is history
not even primarily about the past?
What does it mean to celebrate the past? How is a celebration different from a commemoration? Should the abolition of
the slave trade be celebrated or commemorated, or does it matter which?
Does slavery exist today? Describe why, how, and in what conditions modern slavery exists. Is there a modern-day
abolitionist movement?
©2009 Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
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V I R G I N I A