1833, Act on the Abolition of Slavery in the British Empire

The Act on the Abolition of Slavery in the British Empire was a law in 1833 that officially ended the practice of slavery across all British-held colonies in the world. Slavery itself had been declared illegal in Great Britain on a technicality in 1772, and the trade of enslaved people was banned in 1807. Abolitionist leaders had hoped that the 1807 law would end slavery, but the practice continued in the British colonies. These colonies had mainly agricultural-based economies that relied on human labor.

By the early-nineteenth century, rebellions by enslaved people in the colonies, pressure from abolitionist groups, and shifts in economic priorities had called into question the moral and legal standing of slavery. The British parliament officially ended the practice across the Empire on August 28, 1833, with the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act. The act took effect a year later, and after a period of adjustment, slavery was phased out by 1838.

Background

The age of European exploration in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is intimately tied to the expansion of the trade of enslaved individuals to people in the “New World.” The Portuguese were the first Europeans to explore the coast of West Africa in the mid-1440s, establishing trading posts in the area over the next two decades. Slavery had been a lucrative business in Africa for centuries with several West African kingdoms achieving great wealth in the trade of enslaved people with Muslim-held lands to the north.

The Portuguese took advantage of this trade and rose to become the dominant power in the trade of enslaved people by the sixteenth century. They were joined by the Spanish and Dutch who also established significant transatlantic trading networks. In the seventeenth century, Great Britain joined in the race for overseas colonies and challenged the dominance of the Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch. By the start of the eighteenth century, Britain had emerged as the dominant power in the transatlantic trade of enslaved people. From 1663 to 1807, when Parliament banned the trade of enslaved people, British ships made more than twelve thousand slaving voyages and transported more than 3.4 million Africans to Britain and its colonies.

Overview

By the mid-eighteenth century, a group known as the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, had begun a movement against slavery in Great Britain and its American colonies. The movement was bolstered by a 1772 legal case, Somerset v Stewart, in which an enslaved servant named James Somerset escaped from his American enslaver while in England. Although he was recaptured, he won his freedom when the court determined that English law had never officially authorized slavery within its borders. In effect, this made slavery illegal in England.

Slavery was much more common in the Caribbean and the southern British American colonies than it was in the north and in Great Britain itself. Emboldened by the paradox that slavery was technically illegal in England yet legal in its colonial territories, members of religious groups and anti-slavery politicians came together in 1787 to form the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Britain’s first abolitionist society.

A member of the society, Thomas Clarkson, traveled throughout Britain to rally support for abolition while Member of Parliament William Wilberforce worked to garner legislative support in the House of Commons. Their efforts paid off when Parliament passed the Act on the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the British Empire in February 1807. The act became law in March. The law forbade the trade of enslaved people across the Empire but did not outlaw slavery in the colonies.

Wilberforce and other abolitionist leaders hoped that the new law would gradually spell the end of slavery, but the practice did not stop. The British colonies still believed that their economies were financially dependent on slavery. Furthermore, other nations still engaged in slavery and the trade of enslaved people, which meant that the supply of forced labor would not dry up. With the trade banned, some British ships began smuggling enslaved people, which increased demand and the value of enslaved labor. Ship captains who were caught smuggling enslaved people faced large fines, leading some to throw their human cargo overboard if they spotted a Royal Navy ship.

In 1823, Wilberforce was among a group of abolitionists who formed the Anti-Slavery Society with the goal of ending slavery once and for all across the Empire. Some advocates pushed for the gradual elimination of slavery to help both the enslaver and the enslaved adjust to the new reality, while others wanted it halted immediately. While the British Parliament agreed with an immediate end to the practice, they left legal matters up to colonial legislatures, which balked at the idea of ending slavery.

By the 1820s and 1830s, several occurrences began to change the tide. The economic benefits of Great Britain’s three-way transatlantic trade system were becoming less efficient. In addition, three British Caribbean colonies had been rocked by rebellions, including a revolt of sixty-thousand enslaved people in Jamaica in 1831. Both events, in addition to the pressure from abolitionists, compelled the British Parliament to pass the Act on the Abolition of Slavery in the British Empire in 1833.

The act was made official by royal decree on August 28, 1833, and took effect on August 1, 1834. The act outlawed slavery across the Empire, most notably in British colonies in the Caribbean and South Africa. It compensated enslavers with twenty million pounds for the “cost” of losing their labor force. According to the law, enslaved children under the age of six were freed immediately, while those older than age six were forced to work as “apprentices” for a period of six years. Abolitionists in Great Britain pushed for the end of this system of indentured servitude and were successful in winning complete emancipation for all enslaved people on August 1, 1838.

In 1998, the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 was technically repealed by the British Parliament. The act had been superseded by further anti-slavery laws in the nineteenth century and the Human Rights Act of 1998, which incorporated the tenets of the European Convention on Human Rights into British law.

Bibliography

Gogo, Teni. “Slavery’s Painful Legacy: The British Empire’s Role in the Trade of Enslaved People.” History Extra, Nov. 2022, www.historyextra.com/period/general-history/slavery-british-empire-legacy/. Accessed 18 June 2023.

Oldfield, John. “Abolition of the Slave Trade and Slavery in Britain.” British Library, 4 Feb. 2021, www.bl.uk/restoration-18th-century-literature/articles/abolition-of-the-slave-trade-and-slavery-in-britain. Accessed 18 June 2023.

Olusoga, David. “The History of British Slave Ownership Has Been Buried: Now Its Scale Can Be Revealed.” The Guardian, 11 July 2015, www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/12/british-history-slavery-buried-scale-revealed. Accessed 18 June 2023.

“The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.” The History Press, 2023, www.thehistorypress.co.uk/articles/the-slavery-abolition-act-of-1833/. Accessed 18 June 2023.

“Slavery and the British Transatlantic Slave Trade.” The National Archives, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/british-transatlantic-slave-trade-records/. Accessed 18 June 2023.

“Timeline of the Slave Trade and Abolition.” Historic England, 2023, historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/the-slave-trade-and-abolition/time-line/. Accessed 18 June 2023.

Tomes, Luke. “7 Reasons Why Britain Abolished Slavery.” History Hit, 16 Oct. 2020, www.historyhit.com/reasons-why-britain-abolished-slavery/. Accessed 18 June 2023.

“The Triangular Trade.” American Battlefield Trust, 2023, www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/triangular-trade. Accessed 18 June 2023.