The slave trade and its abolition

For much of Britain's history as a trading power, part of that trade was in human beings. Ships crossed from Britain to West Africa, loaded captured people in chains, and carried them across the Atlantic to work, unpaid and by force, on plantations in America and the Caribbean. Conditions on board were brutal, and those who survived the crossing faced a life of forced labour, with no freedom and no legal rights over their own bodies. Some resisted, tried to escape, or rose up against their captors.

Opposition to this trade grew in Britain, led by campaigners including Quakers and the MP William Wilberforce, who worked for years to turn public opinion and Parliament against it. Their campaigning produced results in stages. The first breakthrough came in 1807, when Parliament made it a crime to carry captives on British ships or send them out from British harbours. Ending the trade did not end slavery itself. Enslaved people had to wait further years before the Emancipation Act of 1833 freed them across the entire British Empire.