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Towards the end of the 18th century, a movement emerged calling for an end to the slave trade and, later, slavery itself. Professor John Oldfield traces the road to abolition from the 1780s to the 1830s, highlighting the impacts of grass-roots organisation, leadership, Black resistance and pro-slavery interests.
Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade officially began, with royal approval, in 1663. In less than 150 years, Britain was responsible for transporting millions of enslaved Africans to colonies in the Americas, where men, women and children were forced to work on plantations and denied basic rights. This inhumane system led to the emergence of racist ideas and pseudoscience that were used to justify it.
Towards the end of the 18th century, a movement emerged calling for an end to the slave trade and, later, slavery itself. Abolitionism was one of the most successful reform movements of the 18th and 19th centuries. It was also one of the most protracted. It took 20 years to abolish Britain’s involvement in the slave trade and a further 26 years to abolish British colonial slavery in the Caribbean. While it is tempting to see abolition as a triumphalist story, the reality is rather different. Each stage in this struggle was bitterly fought over, pitting anti-slavery activists against powerful pro-slavery interests. The international context was also important, as were grass-roots organisation, strong leadership and what today we might call capacity building; that is, efforts to create unity and purpose, even in the face of determined opposition.
Forming Britain’s first anti-slavery society
Properly speaking, the history of large-scale British anti-slavery organising dates from the late 1780s. Of course, there were important initiatives before this date, including Lord Mansfield’s decision in the Somersett case (1772), which set a limit on the ability of masters to take African ‘servants’ out of Britain against their will. There were also Granville Sharp’s efforts, along with those of the free Africans Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano, to publicise the facts of the 1781 Zong massacre, in which the owner of the Zong attempted to collect insurance money for 133 sick and dying enslaved Africans who had been thrown overboard, as the ship lay stranded in the mid-Atlantic.[1]
But these stirrings did not as yet represent a coherent movement. That was to come in the years immediately following the American Revolution (1776–1783). It is no coincidence, for instance, that the first organised anti-slavery society in Britain, the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (SEAST), was founded in May 1787, taking its inspiration from events on the other side of the Atlantic, where the American Revolution had witnessed the first tentative steps to abolish slavery and the slave trade, mainly in Northern colonies (now states) such as Pennsylvania and New York.[2]
For more knowledge refer here: https://www.bl.uk/restoration-18th-century-literature/articles/abolition-of-the-slave-trade-and-slavery-in-britain
