Download or read book Britain s War Against the Slave Trade written by Anthony Sullivan and published by Frontline Books. This book was released on 2020-04-30 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story of the Royal Navy’s sixty-year campaign to stop slavery across the British Empire, decades before the American Civil War. Long before recorded history, men, women and children had been seized by conquering tribes and nations to be employed or traded as slaves. Greeks, Romans, Vikings, and Arabs were among the earliest of many peoples involved in the slave trade, and across Africa the buying and selling of slaves was widespread. There was, at the time, nothing unusual in Britain’s somewhat belated entry into the slave trade, transporting natives from Africa’s west coast to the plantations of the New World. What was unusual was Britain’s decision, in 1807, to ban the slave trade throughout the British Empire. Britain later persuaded other countries to follow suit, but this did not stop this lucrative business. So the Royal Navy went to war against the slavers, in due course establishing the West Africa Squadron, which was based at Freetown in Sierra Leone. This force grew throughout the nineteenth century until a sixth of the Royal Navy’s ships and marines was employed in the battle against the slave trade. Between 1808 and 1860, the West Africa Squadron captured 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans. In Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade, naval historian Anthony Sullivan reveals the story behind this little-known campaign. Whereas Britain is usually, and justifiably, condemned for its earlier involvement in the slave trade, the truth is that in time the Royal Navy undertook a major and expensive operation to end what was, and is, an evil business.

Download or read book Britain s War Against the Slave Trade written by Anthony Sullivan and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Crossings written by James Walvin and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We all know the story of the slave trade—the infamous Middle Passage, the horrifying conditions on slave ships, the millions that died on the journey, and the auctions that awaited the slaves upon their arrival in the Americas. But much of the writing on the subject has focused on the European traders and the arrival of slaves in North America. In Crossings, eminent historian James Walvin covers these established territories while also traveling back to the story’s origins in Africa and south to Brazil, an often forgotten part of the triangular trade, in an effort to explore the broad sweep of slavery across the Atlantic. Reconstructing the transatlantic slave trade from an extensive archive of new research, Walvin seeks to understand and describe how the trade began in Africa, the terrible ordeals experienced there by people sold into slavery, and the scars that remain on the continent today. Journeying across the ocean, he shows how Brazilian slavery was central to the development of the slave trade itself, as that country tested techniques and methods for trading and slavery that were successfully exported to the Caribbean and the rest of the Americas in the following centuries. Walvin also reveals the answers to vital questions that have never before been addressed, such as how a system that the Western world came to despise endured so long and how the British—who were fundamental in developing and perfecting the slave trade—became the most prominent proponents of its eradication. The most authoritative history of the entire slave trade to date, Crossings offers a new understanding of one of the most important, and tragic, episodes in world history.

Download or read book Africa Squadron written by Donald L. Canney and published by Potomac Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2006 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Donald L. CanneyOCOs study is the first book-length history of the U.S. NavyOCOs Africa Squadron. Established in 1842 to enforce the ban on importing slaves to the United States, in twenty yearsOCO time the squadron proved ineffective. To officers and enlisted men alike, duty in the squadron was unpopular. The equatorial climate, departmental neglect, and judicial indifference, which allowed slavers back at sea, all contributed to the sailorsOCO frustration. Later, the most damaging allegation was that the squadron had failed at its mission. Canney investigates how this unit earned a poor reputation and whether it is deserved. Though U.S. warships seized slave vessels as early as 1800, four decades passed before the Navy established a permanent squadron off the western coast of Africa to interdict U.S.-flag vessels participating in this trade. Canney traces the NavyOCOs role in interdicting the slave trade, Great BritainOCOs pressure on the U.S. government to curb slave traffic, the creation of the squadron, and how individual politicians, department secretaries, captains, and squadron commanders interpreted the laws and orders from higher authorities, changing squadron operations. While famous ships and captains served on this station, none won distinction in the Africa Squadron. In the final analysis, the squadron was unsuccessful, even though it was the NavyOCOs only permanent squadron with a specific, congressionally mandated mission: to maintain a quasi-blockade on a foreign shore. While Canney exonerates southern-born naval captains, who approached their work as diligently as their counterparts from the north, he demonstrates how the secretaries of the NavyOCopro-slavery southern politiciansOConeglected the squadron."

Download or read book After Abolition written by Marika Sherwood and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2007-02-23 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the Emancipation Act of 1833, Britain seemed to wash its hands of slavery. Not so, according to Marika Sherwood, who sets the record straight in this provocative new book. In fact, Sherwood demonstrates that Britain continued to contribute to the slave trade well after 1807, even into the twentieth century. Drawing on government documents and contemporary reports as well as published sources, she describes how slavery remained very much a part of British investment, commerce and empire, especially in funding and supplying goods for the trade in slaves and in the use of slave-grown produce. The nancial world of the City in London also depended on slavery, which - directly and indirectly - provided employment for millions of people. "After Abolition" also examines some of the causes and repercussions of continued British involvement in slavery and describes many of the apparently respectable villains, as well as the heroes, connected with the trade - at all levels of society. It contains important revelations about a darker side of British history, previously unexplored, which will provoke real questions about Britain's perceptions of its past

Download or read book Econocide written by Seymour Drescher and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2010-08-30 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this classic analysis and refutation of Eric Williams's 1944 thesis, Seymour Drescher argues that Britain's abolition of the slave trade in 1807 resulted not from the diminishing value of slavery for Great Britain but instead from the British public's mobilization against the slave trade, which forced London to commit what Drescher terms "econocide." This action, he argues, was detrimental to Britain's economic interests at a time when British slavery was actually at the height of its potential. Originally published in 1977, Drescher's work was instrumental in undermining the economic determinist interpretation of abolitionism that had dominated historical discourse for decades following World War II. For this second edition, which includes a foreword by David Brion Davis, Drescher has written a new preface, reflecting on the historiography of the British slave trade since this book's original publication.

Download or read book Bury the Chains written by Adam Hochschild and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2006 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of a handful of men, led by Thomas Clarkson, who defied the slave trade and ignited the first great human rights movement. Beginning in 1788, a group of Abolitionists moved the cause of anti-slavery from the floor of Parliament to the homes of 300,000 people boycotting Caribbean sugar, and gave a platform to freed slaves.

Download or read book The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade written by Robert Burroughs and published by Studies in Imperialism. This book was released on 2018-02 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The suppression of the Atlantic slave trade saw the British Empire turn naval power and moral outrage against a branch of commerce it had previously done much to promote. The authors assembled here bridge the gap between ship and shore to reveal the motives, effects and legacies of this nineteenth-century campaign. As the first academic study of Britain's efforts to suppress the Atlantic slave trade in more than thirty years, the book gathers experts in history, literature, historical geography, museum studies and the history of medicine to re-examine naval suppression in light of recent work on slavery and empire. Three sections reveal the policies, experiences and representations of slave-trade suppression from the perspectives of metropolitan Britons, liberated Africans, black sailors, colonialists and naval officers. A collaborative endeavour, this new history of the slave trade offers striking conclusions about the importance of African personnel in sustaining the Royal Navy's operations, as well as a case study of liberated slaves' experiences of 'freedom,' critical readings of the public and private literature of suppression and an innovative analysis of the commemoration of the anti-slavery squadron during Britain's 2007 bicentennial of abolition. These social, political and cultural studies of naval suppression will inform our understanding of imperial history, the Atlantic world, slavery and abolition, whether introducing the campaign to new audiences or encouraging scholars to reconsider it afresh"--Page 4 of cover.

Download or read book The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law written by Jenny S. Martinez and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2012-01-04 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a broad consensus among scholars that the idea of human rights was a product of the Enlightenment but that a self-conscious and broad-based human rights movement focused on international law only began after World War II. In this book, the nineteenth century's absence is conspicuous - few have considered that era seriously, much less written books on it. But as this author shows, the foundation of the movement that we know today was a product of one of the nineteenth century's central moral causes: the movement to ban the international slave trade.

Download or read book Dark Voyage written by Christian M. McBurney and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Dark Voyage: An American Privateer's War on Britain's African Slave Trade, veteran researcher and writer Christian McBurney recreates the harrowing voyage of the Marlborough, while placing it in the context of Atlantic World slavery. In Africa, Marlborough's officers come across an array of African and European slave traders willing to assist them in attacking the British. This book is also the first study to detail the many captures American privateers made of British slave ships during the Revolutionary War." --

Download or read book Dark Voyage written by Christian M. McBurney and published by . This book was released on 2022-05-20 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dark Voyage: An American Privateer's War on Britain's African Slave Trade is the never-before-told story of the extraordinary 1778 voyage of the American ship Marlborough that sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to attack the heart of the British slave trading empire in West Africa. Conceived and funded by prominent Rhode Island merchant John Brown, the 20-gun double-decked brig and its mission would have been forgotten were it not for the little-known primary source document, Journal of the Good Ship Marlborough, recognized by the author for its extraordinary importance to the history of slavery and the American Revolution.

Download or read book The Interest written by Michael Taylor and published by Jonathan Cape. This book was released on 2020-11-05 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For two hundred years, the abolition of slavery in Britain has been a cause for self-congratulation - but no longer. In 1807, Parliament outlawed the slave trade in the British Empire, but for the next quarter of a century, despite heroic and bloody rebellions, more than 700,000 people in the British colonies remained in slavery. And when a renewed abolitionist campaign was mounted, making slave ownership the defining political and moral issue of the day, emancipation was fiercely resisted by the powerful 'West India Interest'. Supported by nearly every leading figure of the British establishment - including Canning, Peel and Gladstone, The Times and Spectator - the Interest ensured that slavery survived until 1833 and that when abolition came at last, compensation was given not to the enslaved but to the slaveholders. Worth e340 billion in today's money, this was the largest pay-out in British history before the banking rescue package of 2008, incurring a national debt that was only repaid in 2015 and entrenching the power of slaveholders and their families to shape modern Britain. Drawing on major new research, this long-overdue and ground-breaking history shows that the triumph of abolition was also one of the darkest episodes in British history, revealing the lengths to which British leaders went to defend the indefensible in the name of profit.

Download or read book The Black Joke written by A.E. Rooks and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-01-18 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The most feared ship in Britain's West Africa Squadron, His Majesty's brig Black Joke was one of a handful of ships tasked with patrolling the western coast of Africa in an effort to end hundreds of years of global slave trading. Sailing after the spectacular fall of Napoleon in France, yet before the rise of Queen Victoria's England, Black Joke was first a slaving vessel itself, and one with a lightning-fast reputation; only a lucky capture in 1827 allowed it to be repurposed by the Royal Navy to catch its former compatriots. Over the next five years, the ship's diverse crew and dedicated commanders would capture more ships and liberate more enslaved people than any other in the Squadron. Author A.E. Rooks chronicles the adventures on this ship and its crew in a narrative of the history of Britain's suppression efforts. As Britain slowly attempted to snuff out the transatlantic slave trade by way of treaty and negotiation, enforcing these policies fell to the Black Joke and those that sailed with it as they battled slavers, weather disasters, and interpersonal drama among captains and crew that reverberated across oceans. In this history of the daring feats of a single ship, the abolition of the international slave trade is revealed as an inexplicably extended exercise involving tense negotiations between many national powers, both colonizers and formerly colonized, that would stretch on for decades longer than it should have"--

Download or read book The Battle Against Slavery written by Paul L. Dawson and published by Frontline Books. This book was released on 2022-03-24 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 13 December 1776, the Rev. William Turner preached the first avowedly anti-slavery sermon in the North of England. Copies of his sermon were distributed far and wide – in so doing, he had fired the first shot in the battle to end slavery had begun. Four years later, Rev. Turner, members of his congregation and the Rev. Christopher Wyvill founded ‘The Yorkshire Association’ to agitate for political and social reform. The Association sought universal suffrage, annual parliaments and the abolition of slavery. In the West Riding, despite furious opposition, by 1783 nearly 10,000 signatures were collected in support of the aims of the Association. Slavery, or rather its abolition, was now on the political agenda. The Battle Against Slavery charts the story of a group of West Riding radicals in their bid to abolish slavery both in the United Kingdom and abroad. Such became the influence of this group, whose Unitarian beliefs were illegal in Britain, that the general election of 1806 in Yorkshire was fought on an abolitionist platform. At a time when the rest of the world engaged in slavery, this small body was fighting almost single-handedly to end such practices. Gradually, their beliefs began to spread across the country and across the Channel to France, the principles of which found resonance during the French Revolution and even across the Atlantic to America. At a time, today, when the history of slavery is the subject of considerable debate worldwide, this revealing insight into the abolitionist movement, which demonstrates how ordinary men and women battled against governments and the establishment, needs to be told. The Battle Against Slavery adds an important dimension to the continuing debate over Britain’s, and other nations’, involvement in the slave trade and demonstrates how the determination of just a few right-minded people can change world opinion forever.

Download or read book Rough Crossings written by Simon Schama and published by Harper Perennial. This book was released on 2007-05-01 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you were black in America at the start of the Revolutionary War, which side would you want to win? When the last British governor of Virginia declared that any rebel-owned slave who escaped and served the king would be emancipated, tens of thousands of slaves fled from farms, plantations, and cities to try to reach the British camp. A military strategy originally designed to break the plantations of the American South had unleashed one of the great exoduses in U.S. history. With powerfully vivid storytelling, Schama details the odyssey of the escaped blacks through the fires of war and the terror of potential recapture, shedding light on an extraordinary, little-known chapter in the dark saga of American slavery.

Download or read book Slave Empire written by Padraic X. Scanlan and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2020-11-26 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Engrossing and powerful . . . rich and thought-provoking' Fara Dabhoiwala, Guardian 'Path-breaking . . . a major rewriting of history' Mihir Bose, Irish Times 'Slave Empire is lucid, elegant and forensic. It deals with appalling horrors in cool and convincing prose.' The Economist The British empire, in sentimental myth, was more free, more just and more fair than its rivals. But this claim that the British empire was 'free' and that, for all its flaws, it promised liberty to all its subjects was never true. The British empire was built on slavery. Slave Empire puts enslaved people at the centre the British empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In intimate, human detail, Padraic Scanlon shows how British imperial power and industrial capitalism were inextricable from plantation slavery. With vivid original research and careful synthesis of innovative historical scholarship, Slave Empire shows that British freedom and British slavery were made together.

Download or read book Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery written by David Richardson and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Britain’s dominant port for the slave trade in the eighteenth century, Liverpool is crucial to the study of slavery. And as the engine behind Liverpool’s rapid growth and prosperity, slavery left an indelible mark on the history of the city. This collection of essays, boasting an international roster of leading scholars in the field, sets Liverpool in the wider context of transatlantic slavery. The contributors tackle a range of issues, including African agency, slave merchants and their society, and the abolitionist movement, always with an emphasis on the human impact of slavery.