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.