Ebook: The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Origins and Effects in Europe, Africa, and the Americas

The fifteen original essays in this collection focus on the global impact of the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. Based on primary research by specialists in African oral history, West Indian historical demography, European class and intellectual history, and Latin American cultural development, these essays collectively explore the ironies and dilemmas arising from the attempt to abolish an institution that was so broadly accepted and firmly entrenched in the world economy.

The essays are grouped geographically. The first section examines the genesis of abolition in England against the background of major contemporary intellectual and social trends. Here, the essays embody the newer ideological approach to abolition which, with its emphasis on antislavery as a part of new attitudes to property and as a popular movement, is in the process of transcending the older debate on the relative importance of humanitarian and economic factors in bringing about abolition.

The next group of essays relates the slave traffic to a number of internal African developments. New insights into the adverse effect of the slave trade are provided, although some of the contributors suggest that relative to the complex indigenous economies that existed, the slave trade and therefore abolition were of slight importance in some areas. In other areas, abolition actually encouraged indigenous forced labor by forcing down slave prices and encouraging trade in produce. It also resulted in political instability and thereby, for the British at least, brought into conflict abolition and imperial goals.

The third section examines the mechanics of the illegal slave trade and the effects of the British, Dutch, and French attempts to suppress it. The authors suggest that national rivalries and the emerging international law meant that prohibition became effective only when the importing and exporting countries themselves enforced abolition or were prepared to cede the necessary enforcement powers to others. Meanwhile, European countries in the vanguard of the industrialization-modernization process, with its emphasis on free labor, found that not only was their power to suppress the traffic limited by their own ideology, but that their own capital and trade goods as well as their demands for plantation produce were forming the basis of the slave trade they wished to suppress.

The last group of essays is devoted to one of the central themes in the debate about abolition—the relation between the slave trade and New World demographic and cultural trends.

The range of subjects in this volume illustrates the continuing interest in the study of slavery and abolition. The new work on these topics reveals unsettling ironies, making it difficult to assume easy positions on issues which at first sight would seem to be ethically clear cut.

David Eltis, Instructor in the Department of Economics at Algonquin College, Canada, has had several articles published in scholarly journals and anthologies. James Walvin is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of York, England. He has written several books on British social history and is the coeditor of Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation (1977). Svend E. Green-Pedersen is a lecturer at Aarhus University, Denmark, and has published a number of articles on the Danish slave trade.