Innovation & Wealth › Industrial revolution › Sugar plantations and the Atlantic slave trade
Abolition of the slave trade and slavery
1807 (UK slave trade); 1833 (British Empire); 1865 (US); 1888 (Brazil)· Law or policy· Laws, labor & antitrust
Well documentedSolid records, texts or physical evidence.
Over about 80 years, campaigns, slave revolts and war ended the Atlantic slave trade and then slavery itself in the Americas.
See it on the Innovation & Wealth map →What happened
Britain banned its slave trade in 1807 after a campaign by Quakers, Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce and formerly enslaved writer Olaudah Equiano, backed by mass petitions and sugar boycotts. Revolts in Haiti (1791–1804) and Jamaica (1831–32) raised the stakes. Britain freed about 800,000 enslaved people from 1834 but paid £20 million compensation to owners, not the enslaved, about 40% of a year's government spending. The US ended slavery in 1865 after the Civil War; Brazil was last, in 1888.
Impact on society and the economy
It ended a profitable, legal business largely on moral and political grounds, a rare case of public pressure overriding powerful economic interests, though freed people received little.
How we know
Parliamentary acts and debates, petition records, the Legacies of British Slavery database at University College London listing compensated owners, and narratives by formerly enslaved people.
Still debated
Eric Williams argued slavery was abolished because it had become unprofitable; Seymour Drescher and many later historians find it was still profitable, making abolition mainly a political choice.
Connections (3)
▸Sugar plantations and the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in stages by Abolition of the slave trade and slaveryWell documented
The connection
Plantation slavery's brutality, exposed by formerly enslaved writers, slave-ship diagrams and Parliamentary evidence, fueled the abolition movement. Revolts in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) and Jamaica showed the system's instability. Campaigners targeted the trade first, then slavery itself, while West India planters lobbied hard to keep both and won large compensation.
When and how
Britain, the Caribbean and the Americas, 1787–1888; key acts in 1807 and 1833, then the US in 1865 and Brazil in 1888.
How we know
Parliamentary records, petitions, the 1788 Brookes slave-ship print, and planter lobbying records document the campaign and its target.
Debates
How much credit belongs to enslaved people's own revolts, versus British campaigners and politicians, is weighed differently by historians.
▸Eli Whitney's cotton gin made slavery more profitable before Abolition of the slave trade and slaveryMostly agreed
The connection
Before the gin, some Americans expected slavery to fade as tobacco profits fell. Cotton that was cheap to clean made enslaved labor highly profitable across the Deep South, driving the forced migration of about a million enslaved people from the upper South. Cotton wealth hardened slaveholders' resistance, so US abolition came only through the Civil War.
When and how
The US South, 1793–1865, from Georgia and the Carolinas west to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.
How sure are we?
Census counts, plantation and slave-sale records, and cotton price data show slavery expanding with cotton; the counterfactual of slavery fading is uncertain.
Debates
Whether slavery was really declining before 1793 is debated, as is whether the South might ever have ended it without war.
▸Josiah Wedgwood campaigned for Abolition of the slave trade and slaveryWell documented
The connection
Wedgwood joined the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and in 1787 his factory produced a cameo of a kneeling enslaved man captioned 'Am I Not a Man and a Brother?' He gave them away; worn as brooches and set in snuffboxes, it became the campaign's emblem, an early piece of cause marketing.
When and how
London and Etruria, 1787–1795; Wedgwood sent cameos to Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia in 1788.
How we know
Surviving cameos, the Society's minutes, and Wedgwood's correspondence, including his 1788 letter to Franklin.
Debates
Historians note the image showed the enslaved as supplicants rather than actors, and the cameos' actual effect on votes cannot be measured.