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Department of History

Britain and Slave Trade Abolition

Seminar PPT

Seminar Questions

  • Why did Britain eventually abolish the trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833-8?
  • What was the effect of British slave trade abolition on Brazil and Cuba?
      • What was the fate of Liberated Africans in Cuba/ Brazil/ across the Atlantic World?
      • Why have historians been so interested in this very small group of people?

      Core readings (try to do both if you can!)

      • Further reading:

      • Britain, Brazil, Cuba: liberated africans and slave trade abolition:

      • Murray, David R. Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain, and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade. Cambridge University Press, 1980. [short loan at library]

        “Slavery, Mobility and Networks in Nineteenth-Century Cuba,” eds. Daylet Domínguez and Víctor Goldgel Carballo. Atlantic Studies, 18:1 (February 2021): 7-30: special edition [there are several useful essays in here that relate to the historiographical problem of writing about the history of illegal trading, as well as on Liberated Africans and other related topics for the course]

      • Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807-1896, eds. Richard Anderson and Henry B. Lovejoy (Cambridge, 2020) [there's tons of material here for essays/ presentations - lots on the African side: Sierra Leone and Angola]
      • Beatriz Mamigonian, "In the Name of Freedom: Slave Trade Abolition, the Law, and the Brazilian Branch of the African Emigration Scheme (Brazil-British West Indies, 1830s-1850s), Slavery & Abolition
      • Jake Subryan Richards, "The Adjudication of Slave Ship Captures, Coercive Intervention , and Value Exchange in Comparative Atlantic Perspective, ca. 1839-1870," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 62:4 (2020): 836-867.
      • Rosanne M. Adderley, "New Negroes from Africa": Slave Trade Abolition and Free African Settlement in the Nineteenth-Century Caribbean Indiana University Press, 2006 [more focused on British Caribbean but really important context]
      • Bethell, Leslie, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil and the slave trade question, 1807-1869 (Cambridge University Press, 1970)
        • Chapters on the Mixed Commissions [classic survey of British actions in Brazil]
      • Luis Martinez-Fernandez, Fighting Slavery in the Caribbean: The Life and Times of a British Family in Nineteenth-Century Havana. M.E. Sharpe, 1998 [a really interesting, approachable read; many of his cited sources are available to you at the National Archives in London if you are researching a dissertation and able to get there] [content warning: ch 3 contains 2 photographs of enslaved people in situations of capture and punishment in the stocks]

      • - Introduction

        - Chapter 3

      • the best source on Brazil is Beatriz Mamigonian's work (mainly in Portuguese - if you read Portuguese, check with me for bibliography)

      • Johnson, Walter, ed. The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas.

        - Chapter 12, “The Kelsall Affair,” by Manuel Barcia

      • Bergad, Laird, Fe Iglesias and María del Carmen Barcia. The Cuban Slave Market, 1790-1880. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
        - Chapter 4, “The Price Structure of the Cuban Slave Market, 1790-1880,” pp. 38-78, on course extracts page

        - Chapter 5, “Regional Variations in the Cuban Slave Market: Havana, Santiago and Cienfuegos,” pp. 79-121.

      Debates on British abolition of the trade (1807):

      • Christopher Brown Moral Capital, introduction (e-book @ Library)
      • Drescher, Seymour. Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition. Chapel Hill: UNC Press 2010 (second edition) (E-book at library)
        • “Preface to the Second Edition”
        • Chapter 1, “The Decline Theory of Abolition”
        • Chapter 6, “The New Frontier and Abolition”
      • Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery, University of North Carolina Press, [1944] 2021