Ending the Vile Traffic

Sweet Water and Bitter: The Ships that Stopped the Slave Trade, by Siân Rees

The narratives of slavery have, it’s safe to say, replaced the narratives of imperial adventure in our reading lives, and our moral compasses are orientated by indignation at suffering and exploitation rather than by the contemplation of our ancestors’ achievements. The slave trade, considered ‘relevant’ as well as a gruesome spectacle of human suffering on a colossal scale, is taught in schools and familiar to millions to whom ‘Nelson’ suggests only Mandela. And yet the abolition of the slave trade, over long, difficult decades, was one of the bravest and most serious endeavours of the British in the 19th century. Siân Rees examines the long campaign to eradicate the Vile Traffic, as it was called, after 1807 when the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was passed, up until 1869 when the Preventive Squadron lost its independent existence. By 1845, one British merchant wrote:

We have spent £20,000,000 to abolish slavery and £20,000,000 more to repress the Slave trade; yet does no one nation under Heaven give us credit for disinterested sincerity in this large expenditure of money and philanthrophy.

Few historians now give the British much credit, and some Marxists have even proposed that British capitalists only abolished slavery because they saw more profits and potential for exploitation in a post-abolition world.

Few people thought initially that Britain could export its high moral standpoint. After the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, many countries and foreign citizens were in no mood to bow to what they saw as British hypocrisy; it will be remembered how Mrs Elton, in Emma, finds it necessary noisily to disavow any family connection with the trade, and what fun Peacock in Melincourt has with the bien-pensant ‘Anti-Saccharine Society’.