by Tamaal Ghosh

Created on: March 16, 2009   Last Updated: March 19, 2009

Slavery & The Imperial Police.

Although it is common, perhaps even chic, to believe the bulk of the African slave trade was directed at the United States, this was simply not the case.

Well over ninety percent of African abductees were destined for anywhere but the U.S. Out of approximately eleven million million Africans who survived the voyage to the New World, between 60 and 70 percent finished up in Brazil or the sugar colonies of the Caribbean. Others. victims of Arabian readers, were directed at eastern markets, particularly in the Ottoman Empire and in central Europe.

Yet by 1860, approximately two-thirds of all New World slaves lived in the American South.

The United States banned the importation of slaves in 1808. The Act, however, affected only the trade, not slavery itself. That was a matter that was left to each individual state to deal with.

Also, mainly due to American reluctance to allow any interference with its commerce, and lacklustre enforcement by the U.S. Navy (tiny and with a President opposed to naval shipbuilding), it was the Royal Navy that far more energetically put an end to trade in cruelty and misery. This was in spite of the fact that it was a core of the British economy, partly financing the growth of the Navy.

The untiring activities of William Wilberforce who was instrumental in the creation of the free State of Liberia in Africa and who died in 1810 - led to the Slave Trade Act of 1807 banned the slave trade (1807), which made the British Empire the leading anti-slaver. This was a decision made, only partly on moral grounds, after a long campaign in Britain against slavery. This was at considerable cost and during the Napoleonic War, initially because abolition was seen as weakening the French in the Caribbean.

The trade, however, persisted into the 1860s, in part because of the continued existence of slavery in the United States. It was to be fifty-eight years before Lincoln's hard- and war-won Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment in the USA in 1865. With these Acts, almost two-thirds of the world was freed from slavery No other major government or nation has ever officially proclaimed the abolition of slavery.

The ban was even more restrictive than the American ban and after Trafalgar in 1805, the British Royal Navy, the most powerful in the world, could intercept suspected slave ships under belligerent rights.

Following Waterloo, Britain and its Navy had to take a new tack.

There was, at that juncture, only one reason

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>