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The Slave Trade

Over the years there have been many calls for Britain to apologise for its role in the Slave trade. Most recently there were calls for the Prime minister to do this on behalf of the nation. In November last year writing in The New Nation Mr Blair said ‘It is hard to believe that what would now be a crime against humanity was legal at the time. Personally I believe the bicentenary offers us a chance not just to say how profoundly shameful the slave trade was - how we condemn its existence utterly and praise those who fought for its abolition, but also to express our deep sorrow that it ever happened, that it ever could have happened and to rejoice at the different and better times we live in today.’ 
Close but not quite.
Others call for Britain to pay compensation to the descendants of those so shamefully treated.
Still others say defensively Slavery has always been around, or Britain was not alone in the trade, or the Africans themselves captured and sold their people into slavery and so on.
Whatever our views on these issues, and perhaps they will crop up at the second session on Sunday 25th March when we will be talking about slavery, there is no doubt that Britain played a major and unique role.
Yes, slavery was around before we got involved. Men, and it was mostly men, have from time immemorial enslaved their defeated enemies and taken vengeance in this way. Slaves have been used to build great cities, undertake enormous building projects, fight for their conquerors, and attend to all the personal and family needs of their masters.
But it was a matter of dealing with your enemies and even if buying and selling was involved, as in the Arab/Africa situation, the enslaved people were either the defeated or the despised.
It seems to me that what makes Britain’s role so shameful and unique is not the numbers involved, though by any standards they were enormous (3,500,000 Africans were taken to the new World in british ships between 1662 and 1807), but the trade. By the end of the eighteenth century we had applied to slavery all our understanding of modern capitalist economics and combined it with our pre-eminent position as the world’s first industrialised nation.
When the slave ship left Liverpool or Bristol it was loaded to the gunnels with all the merchandise that our new technology could produce, bales of cloth from our mills, iron ware and weapons from our foundries, glassware and coloured beads from our glassworks. All this paid for by the investors they were risking their money in the expectation of a high profit. They were people who had inherited wealth, and people with factories, mills, and mines who employed many workers, they were Christians, including Quakers, and those of no faith - what united them was trade and profit.
When the slave ship reached West Africa the cargo was unloaded and all these goods were used to buy slaves. We are talking about serious money here it is not swapping a few glass beads for a load of slaves. The investors had put up thousands of pounds, in today’s money hundreds of thousands of pounds, and the slave sellers of West Africa new their business and would strike a hard bargain. Loaded with slaves the ship set sail for the Caribbean
Docking in the West Indies the master of the ship needed to get a good price for the slaves. He would need all the money he could get in order to buy sugar. The profits to be made by cultivating sugar were immense. In 1775 total sugar imports accounted for nearly 20% of all British imports and were worth more than five times that of tobacco.
So the Slave Trade was a very lucrative if risky business. annual returns from slaving voyages in the last 50 years of British slaving averaged between 8 and 10%. Born again Christians like John Newton, the author of Amazing Grace, found no difficulty in accommodating his faith to the trade.
In his journal whilst in command of the slave ship Duke of Argyle he records sailing up and down the West African coast bartering for slaves. On 7th January 1751 he bought 8 slaves for a quantity of wood and ivory, but thought himself overcharged because he found one of them had ‘a very bad mouth‘.
The conditions on board ships like the Duke of Argyle would have been appalling. Overcrowding was commonplace and a space allowance of six feet by one foot four inches for a man and less for women and children was considered a reform. Slaves were kept permanently chained up, lying on ledges barely two and a half feet high, as Newton says, ‘like books on a shelf’. Unsurprisingly this coupled with insufficient diet, poor hygiene and lack of exercise led to sickness and death. Cholera and dysentary were common and there was always the risk that slaves might mutiny. On average one in seven slaves would die during the crossing.
Newton would hold religious services on board ship for the crew, he would refuse to do business on Sundays, but he was able involve himself in the Trade without any qualms whatsoever, and he was not alone in this.
It was only in the 1780s that the movement for abolition started to gain momentum. The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade founded in 1788 by Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson, two anglicans although most of the others initially were Quakers, represents the first organised campaign. Add to these members the evangelical members of the Clapham Sect such as, Henry Thornton MP, Zachary Macaulay, and pre-eminently the orator MP William Wilberforce and the struggle for abolition was engaged.
It was to take over two decades but although Bills for reform were rejected by Parliament with even churchmen speaking against abolition, finally the pressure was overwhelming. In Manchester alone 11,00 people signed a petition calling for an end to the trade, that was two thirds of the male population. This first mass campaign achieved the beginning of the end this kind of slavery with the abolition Bill of 1807.
Whilst it is right that we should commemorate the passing of the Bill and the great work of Wilberforce and his colleagues we should not in anyway be patting ourselves on the back for this achievement. As the timeline shows, despite the efforts of the Royal Navy, the trade continued for many more years.
The British slave trader didn’t regard the slave as an enemy, he hadn’t defeated the slave in battle it was simply trade. A triangular trade, goods from Britain, slave cargo from Africa, sugar from the West Indies. There was no difference between glass beads, sugar and an African they were all goods to be traded. This what marks Britain’s part in slavery out .We used all the advantages we had of knowledge, industrial expertise and power in a trade which saw the African as a thing.
‘Am I not a man and a brother’ is the cry which judged and condemned the whole of British society. It is the cry which even today should cause us to bow our heads in shame. It is a cry which should continue far into the future lest we forget.
Alan Redhouse