ABOLITIONS

WAS ABOLITION OF THE AMERICAN AND

BRITISH SLAVE TRADE SIGNIFICANT IN THE
BROADER ATLANTIC CONTEXT?1

David Eltis

In the English speaking Atlantic World, the slave trade and its abolition
received more attention in 2007, both from historians and from the
general public, than in all the preceding ten or fifteen years together.
Media coverage and interest by the public in the bicentenary of aboli-
tion – which in Britain received public funding – was considerable.
But to date this renewed interest in the topic has generated no new
“grand explanatory paradigms” which could rival the interpretations
of Eric Williams and David Brion Davis in an earlier era.
Indeed, most academics were actually skeptical of the commemora-
tion itself. Many argued that since more slaves are traded today than
ever before, especially sex slaves, the act of 1807 lacks significance.
Others have suggested that suppression of the slave trade led directly
to a vast extension of slavery in Africa, because slaves previously sent
across the ocean were now used to produce palm oil, peanuts, cocoa,
cloves and other African exports which an industrializing North Atlan-
tic was increasingly demanding. Recent books on the slave trade have
focused on the contribution of the slaves themselves to ending the
trade, or on class differences in attitudes toward the slave trade.2 These
are certainly interesting questions, but they either ignore the question
of the significance of the ending of the transatlantic slave trade in the
wider Atlantic context, or downplay its importance.
The first step toward an historical reassessment requires an under-
standing of what it was that was abolished. The new on-line transatlan-
tic slave trade database containing details of 35,000 voyages plus the

1
The author wishes to thank Seymour Drescher, Jane Hooper, Susan Socolow, and
especially Robert Desrochers for careful reading of and insightful comments on an
earlier version of this paper.
2
Christopher, Slave Ship Sailors; Taylor, “If we must die”. Rediker, Slave Ship,
p. 352, asks the question “Might the term ‘shipmates’ have been generous and big-
hearted enough to allow the oppressed to show humanity to the very people who had
presided over their enslavement aboard a slave ship?”
118 david eltis

Tradewinds and ocean currents shaped the direction of the transatlantic slave
trade, determining which Africans arrived in which parts of the Americas,
as well as which slave-trading nations would dominate. The tradewinds and
currents effectively created two systems of routes, or circuits – one in the north
with voyages originating in Europe and North America, and the other in the
south with voyages originating in Brazil and the Rio de la Plata. For slave
traders using the northern circuit, the Guinea Current that carried vessels to
West Africa was also important.
Map 1. Ocean currents in the Atlantic.
 american and british slave trade 119

associated estimates interface makes this process somewhat easier than

in the past, and reveals patterns that scholars have not noticed previ-
ously.3 It now seems likely that there were two underlying environ-
mental structures to the traffic, and therefore two somewhat distinct
slave trades, rather than one. Figure 1 shows two systems of wind and
ocean currents in the North and South Atlantic that follow the pattern
of giant “wheels” – one lies North of the equator and turns clockwise,
while its Southern counterpart turns counter-clockwise.4
The Northern wheel largely shaped the North European slave trade,
and was dominated by the English. The Southern wheel shaped the
huge trafficking to Brazil, which for three centuries was almost the
exclusive preserve of the largest slave traders of all, the Portuguese.5
Despite their use of the Portuguese flag, slave traders using the South-
ern wheel ran their business from ports in Brazil, not in Portugal.
Winds and currents thus ensured two major and largely separate
slave trades – the first based in Europe, the second based in Brazil.
Winds and currents also ensured that Africans carried to Brazil came
overwhelmingly from Angola, with South-East Africa and the Bight of
Benin playing smaller roles, and that Africans who were transported to
North America, including the Caribbean, left mainly from West Africa,
in particular the Bights of Biafra and Benin and the Gold Coast.
Just as Brazil’s slave trade overlapped with the Northern system by
drawing on the Bight of Benin, the English, French and Dutch also
carried some slaves from Northern Angola into the Caribbean. But the
essentially separate activities of the two systems is best illustrated by
the fact that when the chief slave trader from the pre-1650 Northern
system – the Dutch – forcibly entered the Southern system through the
conquest of Pernambuco, slaving operations shifted immediately from
a triangular trade based in the Netherlands to a bilateral trade based
in Brazil. Four out of five Dutch ships carrying slaves to Pernambuco

3
See Eltis and Richardson, “Introduction,” in Eltis and Richardson, Extending
the Frontiers, for a breakdown of the new information and a summary of the new
findings.
4
See Domingues da Silva, “Atlantic Slave Trade to Maranhão.”
5
The Portuguese delivered slaves through two separate trading networks, one
rooted in the Iberian Peninsula that supplied the early Spanish Americas and Amazo-
nia, and a second, much larger network based in Brazil, which brought slaves directly
from Africa to Northeast Brazil and Rio de Janeiro. Portuguese and Brazilian mer-
chants together accounted for just under half of all slaves transported between 1519
and 1867.
120 david eltis

began their voyages in Brazil, and not in the Netherlands. By the last
quarter of the 18th century, out of the 8 major coastal regions of Africa
from which captives departed for the Americas, only South-East Africa
had yet to be fully integrated into the trade, though this process was
already well underway. It was the one region that was not clearly
attached to either one or the other transatlantic system, in the sense
that it supplied slaves to both North and South America, although in
the 19th century it supplied mainly the latter.
As is well-known, the expansion of the volume of the trade – based
largely on the expansion of the sugar business – was indeed massive
after 1700. It was the most dramatic and striking development in the
history of long-distance migration prior to the movement of more than
fifty million free migrants to the Americas in the 19th and early 20th
centuries. The number of slaves carried off reached 30,000 per year in
the 1690s, and 85,000 a century later. More than 8 out of 10 Africans
pulled into the traffic in the era of the slave trade journeyed to the
Americas in the 150 years after 1700.6 They passed through a relatively
small number of embarkation points on the African coast, and then
dispersed to a much larger range of ports in the Americas, before (in
most cases) continuing the journey overland or via the intra-American
slave trade. The “African diaspora” resulting from the slave trade was
both much larger and more dispersed than the parallel movement of
Europeans to the Americas in the early modern era – as indeed one
would expect, given the fact that someone other than the migrants
themselves was making the decisions about their destination.
This massive expansion and concentration of the traffic was any-
thing but stable or evenly shared across national flags. Figure 1 draws
on the new on-line estimates interface to show the trajectory of the
trade during the last 115 years of its existence – roughly 60 years on
either side of 1807. During this period, 7.8 million captives were car-
ried from Africa across the Atlantic, equal to 62 percent of the latest
estimated aggregate for the whole era of the slave trade. The transat-
lantic traffic may have lasted 360 years, but two-thirds of it happened
after 1750.

6
<http://slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces> roll over “Assessing the Slave Trade,”
click on “estimates,” then “timeline,” at upper right. Slide left delimiter below timeline
to 1700 and right hand delimiter to 1850.
 american and british slave trade 121

Figure 1 demonstrates several features of the slave trade which are

key to understanding the abolition process. First, it shows the central
role of the British and the Portuguese in the slave trade. During the
last 115 years of the traffic, the subjects of these two nations accounted
for over three quarters of it, despite the British abolition in 1807 – half-
way through those 115 years. The Spanish, French, Dutch, Danes and
Americans played only bit parts in much of the slave trade era.7 Sec-
ond, the annualized trend line of slave departures fluctuated strongly.
The volume of slaves fell by between one third and half between
1744 and 1748, 1756 and 1763, 1776 and 1783, and at various times
between 1793 and 1815.8 The largest fluctuations came in the 19th cen-
tury. Between 1829 and 1831, the traffic fell by almost four-fifths, and
after recovering almost to its earlier levels, it plunged again between
1849 and 1852 by almost 90 percent. It would be difficult to find any
major commodity in the Atlantic World during this time – sugar, for
example, or coffee, in one direction, and manufactured goods flowing
in the opposite direction from east to west – that was subject to such
extreme year-to-year variations. The only parallel is the collapse of
cotton exports during the American Civil War, though here, interest-
ingly, it seems that a naval blockade in a situation of all-out war was
the cause.
These preliminary comments, derived from the new estimates of
the slave trade, point to intriguing new issues in the story of abolition
of the American and British slave trades. Perhaps we can begin best
by stating what the 1807 abolition legislation was not. First, it did not
end the slave trade. If we adjust the year limits to post-1807, we find
that three million slaves were carried off after 1807.9 Thus, one quarter
of all slaves ever carried across the Atlantic were transported and sold
after the best known of the abolition acts became law. Figure 1 does
show a decline in the annual volume of the trade after 1807 of about
60 percent in the two following years, but the traffic reached a plateau
thereafter for several years at about 60 percent of its pre-1808 level,
and subsequently returned to a volume close to its previous highs. The

7
<http://slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces>. Roll over “Assessing the Slave Trade,”
click on “estimates,” then reset to default. View the bottom right hand cell of table
after scrolling down.
8
Ibid., and select the specified years. Note the specific estimates of slaves exported
for rollover years at left underneath the x axis.
9
Ibid, but go to top left hand box in “Time frame,” change years to post 1807, click
on “Change selection,” and again check bottom right hand cell.
 0
10,000
20,000
30,000
40,000
50,000
60,000
70,000
80,000
90,000

1
17751
1752
17 53
1 54
17755
1 56
17757
1 58
17759
1 60
17761
1 62
17763
1 64
17765
1 66
17767
1 68
17769
1 70
17771
1 72
17773
1 74
17775
1 76
17777
1 78
17779
1 80
17781
1 82
17783
1 84
17785
1 86
17787
1 88
17789
1 90
17791
1 92
17793
1 94
17795
1 96
17797
1 98
18799
1 00
18801
Portugal/Brazil

1 02
18803
1 04
18805
1 06
18807
1 08
18809
1 10
18811
1 12
Great Britain

18813
1 14
18815
1 16
18817
1 18
18819
1 20
18821
All others
1 22
18823
1 24
18825
1 26
18827
1 28
18829
1 30
18831
1 32
18833
1 34
18835
1 36
1 837
8
1 38
18839
40
118841
1 42
18843
1 44
18845
1 46
18847
1 48
18849
1 50
18851
1 52
1 85
8 543
8
11855
56
118857
58
118
8 6509
118861
62

Figure 1. Annual number of captives carried from Africa by major national participants in the transatlantic slave trade, 1751–1866.
118863
64
118865
66
david eltis 122
 american and british slave trade 123

immediate impact of British and American abolition was apparently

only temporary, and if we were to fit a curve to the pattern of annual
slave departures between say the end of the War of American Inde-
pendence and 1829, it would have a very modest downward slope and
1807 would not appear a significant turning-point.
Second, the British and American abolition acts were not the only
ones passed against the slave trade. If they had been, the slave trade
would still be continuing today. The traffic in slaves was after all, the
most “international” of all business activities, and the American and
British acts extended only to United States and British territory and
their citizens. Third, the British and American abolition acts were not
the first time such legislation was ever passed. That event occurred in
Denmark fifteen years earlier, although it took effect only in 1802. In
addition, it might be argued, the French, while they did not abolish
the slave trade, did abolish slave labor itself in November 1794, and
without the latter, the former could scarcely have existed. On the other
hand, because the French subsequently restored slavery in 1802, and
at the same time re-started a transatlantic slave trade that lasted for
several more decades, then perhaps the French abolition doesn’t really
count.
If not the first, were the mentioned British and American aboli-
tion acts the most significant of the various anti-slave trade measures?
Almost certainly they were not. If we examine the national carriers
of slaves over the whole period of the slave trade, then we find that
only around one quarter of the African captives crossed the Atlantic
under the American and British flags.10 If we change the definition of
significance from the flag of the slave vessel to the regions where the
captives got off the vessel, then the British and American anti-slavery
legislation becomes somewhat more significant.11 But the key point is
that historically the British had supplied many other territories outside
their own empire. Huge numbers of slaves in the Spanish, French and
Dutch Americas arrived in British slave ships before 1807, and they
continued to arrive in the Spanish and the French Americas after 1807,

10
<http://slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces>. Rollover “Assessing the Slave Trade,”
click on “estimates,” reset to default and compare American and British totals in bot-
tom row of table with the total number of slaves exported in the bottom right-hand
cell.
11
Ibid., but in center right hand box click on “national carriers” and change
“broad import regions.” In extreme top right hand box, change “only exports” to
“only imports”.
124 david eltis

although not in British vessels. For such territories, British abolition

simply meant that some other national group took over the traffic to
those regions.
Finally, in this “catalogue of negatives”, the slave trade did not fade
away because other forms of labor arriving under different migration
regimes – contract labor, free migration – proved to be more efficient.
American and British slave traders were carrying more slaves than
ever (or close to) when the legislation was first proposed, during the
campaign to abolish the traffic, and indeed in the very year the aboli-
tion law came into effect. Slaves were a higher proportion of all trans-
atlantic migrants in 1800 than they had ever been before, and were
ever to be again. Consistent with this pattern, slave prices increased
steadily in the century before abolition. They continued to rise during
the abolition campaigns, and subsequently, when the slave trade was
outlawed, prices rose to even higher levels for as long as slavery itself
continued to exist.12
To reappraise the real significance of 1807, I will apply four differ-
ent methods. The first is to locate 1807 in the fundamental restruc-
turing of Atlantic slave-systems that occurred in the last century of
their existence. The second is to view the American, British and Dan-
ish decisions to abolish the trade against the backdrop of the broader
trends in transatlantic migration. Third, I think one should, however
briefly, consider the American, British and Danish decisions on their
own terms, and compare them with the attempts of other countries
to put into effect abolition legislation and treaties. Fourth, and most
important, is the “counterfactual” issue of what the outcome would
have been if these nations had not taken any action against the slave
trade at all.
As regards the first aspect, the period represented in figure 1 brought
dramatic change to both the slave trade with the Americas and to Afri-
can supply systems. In the second half of the 18th century, six impe-
rial systems straddled the Atlantic, each one sustained by a slave trade
which each system tried to carry out under its own flag. The English,
French, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and Danish all operated behind
major trade barriers, and produced a range of plantation produce –
sugar, rice, indigo, coffee, tobacco, alcohol and some precious metals –
sugar usually being the most valuable. It is extraordinary to think that

12
Bergad, “American Slave Markets.”
 american and british slave trade 125

consumers’ pursuit of this limited range of exotic consumer goods,

which collectively added so little human welfare, could have generated
for so long the horrors and misery of the middle passage and planta-
tion slavery. In the century after 1750, destruction or severe curtail-
ment was the fate of every one of these systems. Freer trade in the
form of duty-free ports in the Americas, new polities with more open
trading rules, and new imperial rules such as the Bourbon reforms
meant the reorganization of the slave trade.
By 1850, three plantation complexes had replaced the six plantation
empires controlled from Europe. Two of them – Brazil and the United
States – were independent, and the third, Cuba, was far wealthier and
more dynamic than its European metropolis. The United States pro-
duced most of the world’s cotton, Cuba most of the world’s sugar, and
Brazil had a similarly dominant position in the coffee trade. Slaves dis-
embarked in a wide range of ports grouped in six separate jurisdictions
in the Americas during the 18th century, but by 1850 there were only
a half-dozen such ports in only two jurisdictions, Brazil and Cuba.
American cotton planters, of course, drew on the natural growth of
the black population and a domestic slave trade, rather than Africa, to
meet their labor needs, and thus overall accounted for only 4 percent
of all slaves arriving in the Americas.
This massive reorganization of the traffic and the rapid natural
growth of the United States slave population had little immediate
impact on the size of the transatlantic traffic. The decade 1821 to 1830
witnessed almost as many people a year leaving Africa in slave ships as
happened between 1766 and 1775. Well over a million more – one tenth
of the volume carried off in the slave trade era as a whole – followed in
the thirty years after 1830. But if its impact on volume is questionable
(except for an initial effect), the abolition legislation of 1807 did help
change the direction of the transatlantic slave trade, by undermining
the ability of the largest slave empire in the New World – that of the
British – to access the labor necessary in the long run to sustain its
position.13 The Dutch and Danish plantation complexes were similarly
affected, the Danish through their own abolition measures, and the
Dutch by British diplomatic pressure.14

13
For this argument see Drescher, Econocide; Eltis, Economic Growth, pp. 3–16.
14
Emmer, “Abolition of the Abolished,” pp. 180–6.
126 david eltis

A fresh perspective on this restructuring of the plantation Americas,

as well as the African role in the early modern Atlantic world is possible,
if we abandon the conventional imperial analytical framework and
draw on the earlier discussion of Atlantic winds and currents. Figure 2,
also derived from the latest web site estimates, divides up the slave
trade according to the two ocean current and wind-wheel systems that
slave traders used, although, to sharpen the focus, the period covered
is limited to half a century instead of the 115 years shown in figure
1. The label ”North” in the figure refers to the system North of the
equator which supplied the Caribbean and North American mainland,
and ”South” does the same for the system supplying Brazil. Both track
annual totals of captives carried off from Africa, and the sum of the
two series is the total volume of the slave trade.
The figure nicely demonstrates the immediate impact of 1807.
Viewed through the lens of the new estimates, it might be argued that
abolition was almost entirely a North Atlantic phenomenon. In other
words, of the two slave trading systems shaped by the winds and ocean
currents, it was only the Northern system that was adversely affected.
Indeed, the Southern system appears to have strengthened after 1808.
A second conclusion is that the Southern system was generally subject
to much less annual variation than its Northern counterpart. War was
primarily a North Atlantic phenomenon. The close of hostilities in
1783 triggered a strong recovery in the Northern slave trade, but left
the Southern business unaffected. The impact of a fresh outbreak of
war after 1793, and the return of peace in 1814, are similarly much
more obvious North of the equator than South of it.
The point is strengthened if we return to figure 1, and contrast the
trend line of the Portuguese traffic (overwhelmingly centered South of
the equator), with that of all other nations who were heavily depen-
dent on the Northern wheel. Until well into the 19th century, the
annual fluctuations were modest South of the line, but volatile North
of the equator. The Portuguese/Brazilian traffic of the South Atlantic
continued with virtually no military interruption after Dutch with-
drawal from Brazil in 1654. Produce demand, and supply of slaves
alone determined the trajectory of the Southern slaving system.15

15
<http://slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces>. Repeat procedure for notes 12 and 13;
look to left of screen and click on plus sign beside “national carriers.” Select first
Portuguese trade only, click on “change selection,” then click on timeline. Repeat pro-
100,000
90,000
80,000
70,000
60,000
50,000 North
40,000 South
30,000
20,000
10,000
0
81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
17 17 17 17 17 17 17 17 17 17 17 17 17 17 17 17 17 17 17 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18

Figure 2. Captives leaving Africa annually in the Northern and Southern transatlantic slave trades, 1781–1830.
american and british slave trade
127
128 david eltis

But in the 19th century, the situation changed radically. Figure 1

shows the Portuguese traffic assuming the same dramatic year-to-year
changes from the late 1820s that were observed North of the line in
the previous century. The underlying cause of these fluctuations was
no longer military conflict, but rather events associated with abolition
and suppression of the transatlantic slave trade.
There can be no clearer indication of the existence of two separate
slave trades. Not until the last two decades of the slave trade were the
two trades integrated. By then, measures suppressing the trade were
applied evenly across the Atlantic basins, steamships were eroding the
dependence on winds, and generalized Atlantic naval hostilities were
much less likely.
But the most striking feature of Figure 2 is that it pinpoints the
year in which the Southern system of slave routes began to carry more
captives than the traffic conducted North of the line. The slave traffic
may have continued at high levels after 1807, but the Northern sys-
tem was never again dominant. In one sense, this was a reversal to an
old, well-established pattern, rather than a new departure. The early
transatlantic traffic had first connected Upper Guinea with the Span-
ish Caribbean via the Northern wheel, but by the late 16th century
Southern routes had become more important and remained so during
most of the 17th century. After about 1675, the rise of the Caribbean
sugar industry necessarily ensured the dominance of Northern slave
routes, and the peak period of slave departures in the late 18th century
was made possible by a surge in slave departures from Africa North of
the equator. By 1808, however, as already noted, three North Atlantic
states had withdrawn from the business (including the largest single
Northern national participant) and a fourth, the Dutch, would not
re-enter the trade when peace returned in 1815. These events may not
have ended the transatlantic slave trade, but they did permanently alter
transatlantic slave routes.
Africa’s role in the slave trade both helped to shape, and was in
turn influenced by, these developments. Rebellions on board slave
ships were frequent enough – occurring on perhaps one in ten slave
voyages – that extra crew and weapons were required features of every
slave vessel. The resultant higher costs raised prices of slaves in the

cedure for all national trades except for Portuguese and compare year to year fluctua-
tions with previous results.
 american and british slave trade 129

Americas, and as a direct consequence fewer captives embarked on the

middle passage. Just how many captives were “saved” from the planta-
tion Americas in this way depends on estimates of price elasticities, but
the number was not less than several hundred thousands.16 While we
have firm records of only thirty slave vessels out of 35,000 returning to
the African coast under the control of slaves after a successful revolt,
even the impact of unsuccessful slave rebellions was important for the
volume of slaves carried across the Atlantic, particularly before 1810.
Both the direction of the slave trade, as well as its size, were affected.
Actual, as opposed to anticipated, slave rebellions occurred dis-
proportionately on slave voyages leaving the Upper Guinea coast – a
region clearly in the Northern system. This pattern not only helped
hold down the level of slaving in this region of Africa that was closest
to Europe and the Americas in terms of sailing times, it also meant
that costs were raised for those slaving vessels which avoided the Upper
Guinea coast, by forcing them to sail further South, in an attempt to
reduce the incidence of rebellious slaves on board. The distribution in
the new database of 566 voyages that experienced slave rebellions over
the whole slave trade era indicates that rebellions peaked in the third
quarter of the 18th century, before tapering off strongly thereafter.17
Part of the explanation for this pattern of resistance has to do with
an as yet unexplained phenomenon. For two decades after 1750, slave
vessels experienced significant increases in the time spent obtaining
slaves in the coastal regions to which they had traditionally resorted
for their supply of slaves. These included the Gold Coast, the Bights of
Benin and Biafra, and Angola broadly defined.18 By the 1780s, interest-
ingly and counter-intuitively just as the slave trade was at its all-time
high, slaving times on the coast began to return to former levels. It is
not clear what was behind either the increase or subsequent decline
of coastal trading times, though Islamic reform movements and the

16
Eltis, Behrendt and Richardson, “Costs of Coercion.”
17
<http://slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces>. Roll over “The Database,” select “Search
the Database” then click plus sign for ”General Variables,” at left. Roll over “Itinerary,”
then click on “Principal Place/Region of Slave Purchase.” Select Senegambia, Sierra
Leone, Windward Coast. Click on “Search” and then “Timeline.” In the drop down box
for Y axis at top right, select “Rate of Resistance.” Click “show” to the right. Repeat
for the other five regions of slave purchase and compare Upper Guinea versus the rest
of the African coast.
18
Eltis and Richardson, ”Productivity in the Slave Trade.”
130 david eltis

collapse of Oyo no doubt had an impact in shortening “wait times” in

late 18th century West Africa.
Whatever the cause may have been, it is fairly certain that the shift
of the major slave traders into the three Upper Guinea regions of Sen-
egambia, Sierra Leone, and the Windward Coast was a direct response
to lengthening slaving times in the major and preferred regions of
embarkation. When these slaving times in Lower Guinea and Angola
declined after 1775, slave traders returned to their previous trad-
ing patterns. Thus the incidence of slave revolts increased as Upper
Guinea was pulled into the mainstream of the traffic, and declined as
it returned to its former marginal status as a supplier of slaves.19 The
pattern of slave rebellions meant that slave traders certainly had no
incentive to persevere in Senegambia, Sierra Leone, and the Wind-
ward Coast, and when abolition began to take effect, such a pattern
provided an additional reason to join the shift from the Northern to
Southern systems.
The effect for Africa was a fundamental shift South in the “center
of gravity” of slave trading after 1780. In Upper Guinea, some slave
trading continued into the era of suppression in coastal mangrove
swamps, concealed inlets and shallow rivers as in the Southern rivers
of Senegambia, the Galinhas, Pongo River (as opposed to islands such
as James Fort in the Gambia, Isles de Los, and Bance Island, which
had characterized trading in the 18th century), but the area’s share of
sub-Saharan Africa’s supply of slaves to the Atlantic world declined
markedly. Only a few hundred captives a year left from the Gold Coast
(a major source of slaves for British traders) after 1807. The castles of
the Gold Coast were too exposed, and too much a part of a European
government presence to be well suited to clandestine slave trading.
Some 90 percent of transatlantic captives from West Africa (and car-
ried off via the Northern wheel) left from the Bights of Benin and Bia-
fra after 1807, and the major Biafran ports abandoned the business in
the early 1840s, leaving Whydah and Lagos as the remaining locations
for significant numbers of slaves North of the equator. The redirection

19
But in the nineteenth century an additional factor pulled down the incidence of
shipboard resistance. Between final quarter of the 18th century and the last quarter
century of the transatlantic slave trade, the share of children carried on slave ships
doubled from 18 to 36 percent. Again, the reasons are unclear, but the consequences
for slave rebellions scarcely need to be spelled out.
 american and british slave trade 131

of the slave trade in the last century of its existence was therefore just
as pronounced in Africa, as it was in the Americas.
A second way of assessing the significance of 1807 is to set it against
the backdrop of the broader movement of people across the Atlan-
tic; in other words to compare the slave trade with all other forms
of transatlantic migration. Because non-slave migration is less well-
documented than the slave trade, estimates are less reliable, but the
broad pattern is clear. Servants, convicts, and free migrants were for
most years trivial in numbers. Except for the 16th century, Africans
always outnumbered Europeans on transatlantic vessels, and overall
the ratio was 4 to 1 prior to 1820.
In fact, the abolition of the slave trade occurred at the very point
when both the proportion of transatlantic migrants as well as the abso-
lute volume of slaves were at their respective peaks. There is little indi-
cation here that the slave trade was already in decline when abolished.
Other kinds of migration, which might be termed “migration regimes,”
book-ended the slave trade. Free migration and indentured servitude
brought more people to the New World than the slave trade did in the
first century after Columbian contact, and the same applies again after
the 1820s.20 Contract laborers from Asia and migrants from Europe
in the 19th century were in some sense a substitute for the more prof-
itable, but no longer available, enslaved African captives. Africans
went (or rather were taken) to the tropical and sub-tropical Americas,
which were by far the most prosperous parts of the New World before
1800 and were the destination of most early indentured servants and
later contract laborers.
But a market for captives always existed in the temperate Ameri-
cas as well. In the Southern temperate Americas, the American region
today with lowest ratio of peoples of African descent, the slave popu-
lation of Buenos Aires expanded six times between 1744 and 1810,
while the white population only doubled, and thirty percent of the
population of Buenos Aires was of African descent in the 1830s. The
presence or absence of African captives was a function of the price of
slaves, not differences in ideology or the intensity of racist beliefs, until
late in the 18th century, and a slave trade untrammeled by suppression
policies and free to draw on steam technology could only have brought
down the price of slaves. The British, American and Danish abolition

20
Eltis, “Free and Coerced Migrations.”
132 david eltis

of the slave trade did not necessarily mean active suppression policies,
but it did have the potential to put sections of the Americas beyond
the reach of the slave trade.
This brings us to a third method of evaluating 1807. To revert for a
moment to a more “micro-level” of analysis, how effective was British,
American and Danish abolition of the slave trade? Two definitions of
abolition were mentioned earlier – whether the territories of the country
instituting abolition continued to accept slaves carried by others, and
whether the flag of that country continued to be used by slave traders
after abolition. For the British and the Americans, as well as for the
Danes who preceded them, the immediate decline in slave arrivals into
their territories was dramatic.21 In the case of Brazil and the French
and Spanish Americas, slaves from Africa continued to arrive for sev-
eral decades after it became illegal for them to do so.
The use of flags by slave traders also varied. The Danish and British
flags disappeared from the trade quickly in the early 19th century.22
For the French and American flags, the case is less clear cut. Use of the
national flag diminished considerably, but nevertheless continued at a
reduced level for some years before abolition became effective. After
the double impact of revolution in Saint Domingue, and a losing naval
battle in Europe, the French re-entered the trade when the war ended.
There was then a ten year gap between prescriptive legislation and the
last use of the French flag. The United States flag reemerged in the late
1830s as a cover for Portuguese and Spanish traders faced with British
naval policing. There was certainly some United States involvement in
the later Brazilian and Cuban trades, but the ownership of voyages is
very difficult to establish in the later period.
As regards the late Portuguese and Spanish slave trade, the key
factor was not so much legislation, but rather treaty obligations. The
Anglo-Brazilian treaty of 1826 took effect in 1830, and had a massive
impact, but when slave traders realized that the newly independent

21
<http://slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces>. Rollover “Assessing the Slave Trade,”
click on “estimates,” then at left, click on plus sign to right of “Import regions,” checking
first Danish, British Caribbean, and Mainland North America boxes, and then Brazil,
French and Spanish Americas. In each case, click on “Change selection” and inspect
resulting table.
22
<http://slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces>. Rollover “Assessing the Slave Trade,”
click on “estimates,” then at left, click on plus sign to the right of “Import Regions,”
check first Danish and British Americas only, and then “French Americas,” and
“North American Mainland” in turn, clicking on “Change selection,” each time.
Inspect resulting tables.
 american and british slave trade 133

Brazilian government was not going to enforce the treaty, and that
the British simply did not have the naval strength to patrol the long
African and Brazilian coastlines, the slave trade quickly recovered to
its previous levels. Serious Brazilian action did not take place until
1850, after a British invasion of Brazilian territorial waters.
The Spanish traffic was more complicated. The Spanish abolished
the trade in accordance with an 1817 treaty concluded with the Brit-
ish, which took effect in 1820. Here, too, the traffic declined at first,
but recovered later, when enforcement within Cuba appeared not to
be serious. In the 1840s, a new colonial governor in Cuba took serious
action, and at the same time began to bring in Chinese contract labor-
ers, which temporarily reduced the slave trade despite the opening
up of the British market to slave-grown sugar. Serious English naval
measures in the Caribbean parallel to those on the Brazilian coast were
never likely because the United States federal government, dominated
by the American South, saw the Caribbean as its own sphere of inter-
est, a position which the British tacitly accepted. The United States
was particularly sensitive to British naval officers visiting American
merchant vessels to check credentials, and not until the Civil War and
the displacement of the Southern plantocracy in Washington was real
international cooperation possible to block the slave trade.
The ending of the traffic in slaves is now well known. As figure 1
shows, the decisive declines in its volume occurred in the mid-19th
century rather than in 1807. In 1850 and 1865, the Brazilian and
Cuban governments respectively took serious action against the slave
trade. In effect, the traffic could be halted only by the intervention of
the governments of regions that were either exporting or importing
slaves; it could not be halted by naval action alone. Naval interven-
tion did result in the capture of nearly 2,000 slave vessels after 1808.
Only half of these had slaves on board at the time of capture, but their
200,000 captives (or strictly, re-captives) were diverted from the sugar
and coffee plantations for which they were intended, and, for the most
part, they ended their lives with choices they did not have prior to
their re-capture.23

23
<http://slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces>. Roll over “The Database,” select
“Search the Database” then click plus sign for “General Variables” at left. Roll over “Out-
comes” and select “Captured,” and, at top, select in time frame year greater than 1807.
Hit “Search,” then click on “Summary statistics” at top right to get a profile of slaves
recaptured after 1807.
134 david eltis

This is the basic reason that the British and American acts abolish-
ing the slave trade look ineffective against the backdrop of the 19th
century slave trade. Because these nations were among the first to take
action, and because their jurisdiction was limited to British and United
States territory and citizens, their measures could not realistically be
expected to bring about a general collapse of the slave trade.
Even if this thesis is rejected, the longer perspective nevertheless
suggests that the slave trade (and slave labor as well) came to an end
quickly. For those living at the time, and certainly for the victims of the
traffic, the slave trade dragged on for decades after the major countries
had decided to end it. Yet, slave trading (and slave labor) had been a
basic institution in most societies since the point at which humans
switched from hunting and gathering to agriculture. Suppression of
the transatlantic phase of the business occurred very quickly indeed. In
the Atlantic, it came about in about 80 years from the first campaigns
in the 1780s to the last slave vessel completing a transatlantic trip in
1867, or less if one takes the starting dates as the Haitian revolution. If
we include the Indian Ocean trade which continued to the end of the
19th century, suppression may be judged to have taken 120 years.
But the most important way to assess the impact of American and
British abolition is to inquire into what the outcome would have been
if neither country had implemented such a policy. The first conse-
quence of such an imaginary non-event is clear. Between 1810 and
1900, almost every Atlantic potentate from King Bell of the Camer-
oons to the President of the United States signed literally hundreds
of anti-slave trade treaties. Many countries with no connection to the
Atlantic whatsoever, including the Empires of Austria and Russia, and
the nation of Chile also agreed to treaties – usually designed to prevent
slave traders employing their flags in the business (the new database
does include two transatlantic slave voyages that set sail from Odessa
in the Black Sea in this period).24 Remarkably, no anti-slave trade treaty
was ever signed that did not include the British. No Mixed Commis-
sion Court ever met without a British commissary judge participating.
No other government ever established a separate “slave trade depart-
ment,” complete with permanent staff, within an office of state for
foreign affairs (it was one of only five such departments within the
19th century Foreign Office, the others all being regionally defined),

24
Ibid., then click “Ship,” at right, roll over “ship” select “Voyage identification
number” then enter 1681 and 5083. Click “Search.”
 american and british slave trade 135

and only the French, briefly, came close to matching the ratio of 10
percent of British naval resources that were assigned to slave trade
duties in both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans in the 1840s.25 On the
African coast, anti-slavery treaties were the basis of informal British
influence, and they were used to facilitate debt collection on behalf of
British produce merchants.
Elsewhere, the British interpretation of such treaties resulted in
actions that were clearly illegal and certainly tended to erode the plu-
ralism that is the base component of all civilized behavior between
nations. In addition, as already noted, while naval detentions raised
the costs of doing business, they were not an effective way of suppress-
ing the slave trade. Nevertheless, without British pressure, joined after
1850 by pressure from Brazil, and after 1860 from the United States,
it is difficult to see that the slave trade would have ended when it did,
and of course such pressure could not have existed without the British
first outlawing their own slave trade.26
Second, the abolition acts of 1807 were important because, in their
absence, the two English-speaking powers would have greatly increased
their share of the international slave trade. Prior to the steamship rev-
olution, the American merchant fleet had made serious inroads into
a range of long-distance commercial activities. Between the late 18th
century and the dawn of the steam age in the mid-19th century, the
Americans developed the most competitive whaling fleet in the world,
and not only displaced the British as number one, but also established
a dominant position which the British were never able to match.27 In
the very last years of the slave trade, when South Carolina ports were
reopened, the United States accounted for no less than 23 percent of

25
But given that the French, the Americans or the Portuguese never signed treaties
with anyone other than the British, their naval vessels could only detain suspected
ships that were either under their own flag or the British flag.
26
The foregoing paragraph is based on Eltis, Economic Growth, especially chapters
3 and 8. There have been a spate of recent articles, no doubt triggered by the bicen-
tenary of abolition, on British suppression of the slave trade as an early successful
example of a human rights policy (see e.g. Martinez, “Anti-Slavery Courts”). But these
ignore the central point that British anti-slavery policy was most successful when it
was most illegal. The treaty systems and naval initiatives that remained on the right
side of international law would not by themselves have ended the slave trade.
27
The emergence of the United States whaling fleet forms the subject of one of the
classic studies of the emergence of a new industry in the federal period. See Davis,
Gallman and Hutchins, “Call me Ishmael.”
136 david eltis

the total slave trade – a proportion that could only have increased up
to 1867 and beyond, if a free trade in slaves had developed.28
As the American transatlantic slave trade gradually became illegal
in one state after another between the Revolution and 1807, American
slave traders began to supply other parts of the Americas. In Surinam,
Rio de la Plata and Cuba, American slave ships began to win market
share prior to 1807. Between 1801 and 1806, almost half of all trans-
atlantic vessels bringing slaves into the Rio de la Plata region sailed
under the American flag. In this late phase of the traffic, American
slave vessels, traditionally small rum ships from the Northern states,
became much larger and began to carry more diverse trading cargoes.
They also began to move into slave markets in Africa other than the
forts of the Gold Coast, where they had traditionally obtained the vast
majority of their slaves. South-east Africa again became an impor-
tant source, just as it had been in the late seventeenth for early North
American colonial slavers. All these developments were cut short
by 1807.
As for British prospects in a 19th century world of unrestricted slave
trade, the newly acquired territories of Trinidad and British Guiana
had the potential to be new Jamaicas, a potential that was only par-
tially realized with Asian contract labor from the mid-19th century.
More broadly, no less than two dozen slave vessels in the last years of
the slave trade were steamships – initially on the route from Angola
to Brazil – and while these ships were not British, their machinery, in
some case, indeed, their hulls and fittings, along with almost all of the
manufactured trading goods that formed over half of their outbound
cargoes, were made in Britain. British pre-eminence in steamship
technology may well have provided the entry point into the Southern
ocean current system which the British had been seeking without suc-
cess since the early 18th century.
The British merchant marine in the late 19th century could have
had as a big a share of the slave trade as it held on most of the other
commodity routes of the world. Other flags would not have disap-
peared, but a scenario in which first the United States and then, after
1850, the British share of the slave trade would have risen to historic

28
<http://slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces>. Roll over “The Database,” select “Search
the Database” then click plus sign for “General Variables,” at left. Roll over “ship,” then
select “rig,” and then “steamer.” Click on “Search” and then “Summary Statistics.”
 american and british slave trade 137

highs, is easy to imagine. There is clear historical evidence of British

dominance in the 19th century palm oil trade with West Africa.
A third likely consequence of a continued open slave trade, as
already hinted, was a quite different transatlantic migrant mix in the
19th century Atlantic world. The United States came to hold more
enslaved people than any other country in the Americas. It is clear
that the transatlantic slave trade was not essential to the growth of
the United States plantation economy – after all, the natural growth
of the United States black population from 1 million in 1790 to nearly
4 million in 1860 was the foundation of the cotton economy and its
60 percent share of the world market in 1860. But the same argu-
ment could be made about white immigration into the United States.
After all, the native-born white population also grew strongly after
1800, yet 50 million people still crossed the Atlantic after 1820. Slave
prices quadrupled in the half century after 1807, and an open slave
trade would accordingly have meant many new slaves coming into the
United States. In 1860, indeed, the Montgomery Convention debated
the reopening of the United States slave trade and came close to imple-
menting such a move.29 And we do have records of two shipments of
slaves from Africa into Georgia and Alabama respectively, one in 1858
and the other in 1860.
An open slave trade and no suppression would have meant lower
prices for slaves everywhere in the Americas. The argument is not
that the 50 million migrants would have been coerced Africans rather
than free Europeans, but rather that, instead of a massive internal slave
trade from the Old to the New South in the United States, and from
North-east to South-East Brazil in the 19th century (which were both
a direct result of the abolition of the transatlantic business, something
which is ignored by recent studies),30 there would have been a massive
transatlantic slave trade. The mix of peoples crossing the Atlantic to
North and South America would have been altogether different from
what it was. Given the superior productivity of slaves over free work-
ers, the United States’ rise to great economic power status would no
doubt have occurred at an even more accelerated pace.
A fourth consequence of no suppression (if we broaden our horizons
yet again, to include all forms of coerced migration) is the probable

29
Sinha, Counterrevolution of Slavery.
30
See the essays in Johnson, Chattel Principle.
138 david eltis

continuation of flows of other types of semi-coerced migrants into the

Americas. The decades beyond 1867 saw other (though much smaller)
varieties of long-distance movement of coerced labor disappear even
more quickly than the slave trade. Indentured servant contracts made
in Europe were no longer recognized by United States courts in the
1820s. The flow of contract laborers from Asia to the Americas ended
in 1917, when the Indian government banned it, and the last con-
victs sailed from Britain to Australia in the 1850s. The last convict
dispatched to exile in the Americas returned from Devil’s Island in
Guiana to France in 1952. The final inmates of the Soviet gulags – and
prisoners had been dispatched to Siberia more or less continuously
from the late 17th century to the 1960s – returned probably in the
1980s. What began as an attempt to eliminate the most horrific form
of abducting people against their will, ended with recognition on the
part of almost every nation that forcing any large group of people to
travel under constraint was unacceptable.
Some might think these four scenarios ignore the power of ideas in
history, and that it is anyway inconceivable that any of these alterna-
tives could possibly have occurred in reality. But that is, of course, pre-
cisely the point of the speculation. Coerced migration ended, because
of shifting values and changing conceptions of identity, and in all
cases, the decision to do so was presented in moral terms – it was the
“right” thing to do, and what had happened in the past was “wrong”.
We might conclude that notwithstanding the horrors of forced labor
in the 20th century and the ongoing smuggling of illegal laborers and
sex workers into developed countries, often under terms debt slavery,
it is inconceivable that any traffic in chattel slaves will reappear as a
major social institution in the twenty-first century.
An interpretation that focuses on the shifts in moral values across
the Atlantic world moves away from one that puts British activism at
center stage. The Mixed Commission Courts were not effective in sup-
pressing the trade, and are not beacons for how international courts
can function for the early 21st century world. Such an interpretation
also allows us to get at a fundamental issue in abolition policy which
is still very current today. When the British were most successful in
their direct attacks on sovereign states in Africa and the Americas,
they were usually acting in sharp contravention of international law
as it was then understood. They might have been able to suppress the
slave trade if they had intervened even more (and contravened inter-
national law even more egregiously). Is such behavior ever justified?
 american and british slave trade 139

If people in other jurisdictions than are our own are dying, or sub-
ject to extreme suffering, when should we intervene? In our own day,
Sierra Leone, Kosovo and Iraq suggest that there is no easy answer to
this question.
In the end, one’s view of abolition of the slave trade is shaped by
how one views slave labor and the slave trade. A view of modern “slav-
ery” consistent with the position that there are “27 million slaves living
today” – or alternatively, that “there are more slaves in captivity today,
than ever before in history”– would consign the legal abolition of slave
labor and the slave trade which supported it to historical insignificance.
However, no one who has looked at the abundant documentation
which details the conditions on early modern slave ships – or describes
the conditions of work on 18th century sugar plantations – could
maintain such a viewpoint.
More importantly, I very much doubt if any of the slaves emerging
from the hold of a slave ship after a two-month transatlantic voyage
would sign on to the definitions of slave labor and slave trading implied
by many modern discussions of the abuse of human labor. Frederick
Douglass was in no doubt on this subject in the mid-19th century.31 In
short, the liberal application of the word “slavery” to describe modern
labor conditions was made possible only by the very success of efforts
to eradicate the central institution of early modern society that was
most at odds with modern values and definitions of the self in relation
to non-family others. But, of course, it is the corollary of this statement
that is the more apposite one: it was the emergence of modern values
and conceptions of identity that made possible the success of the anti-
slavery campaign.

31
Roediger, “Race, Labor and Gender,” p. 177.