Britain ended the slave trade. But only on a technicality, and not because it wanted to.

There has been much sputum produced as of late by professional w̶i̶n̶d̶-̶u̶p̶ ̶m̶e̶r̶c̶h̶a̶n̶t̶s̶ patriots Nigel Farage, Laurence Fox, Piers Morgan et al, who are shocked to discover that the lyrics of Rule Britannia, an anthem of British imperial supremacy, are perhaps not an appropriate climax to the BBC Proms, an annual celebration of global musical culture.

The UK should, according to the defenders of our realm, under no circumstances be forced to acknowledge or make provisions for any historical or long lasting harm its colonial spread has caused the world. In fact, our imperial pillaging was full of bonhomie: we improved every culture and society we encountered, and they thanked us for it.

We even went so far as to put an end to the Atlantic human trafficking operation we started. That’s what our patriotic paladins assure us, and that’s a good enough reason to sing the praises of the good fleet Britannia. So stop being an ungrateful bunch of traitors.

But did we actually?

On Sunday, 28 October 1787, William Wilberforce, the Member of Parliament for Yorkshire, wrote in his diary that “God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.”

For the most part, a pretty Good Dude, it seems. It would, however, take him almost 20 more years to legally abolish the trafficking of humans from Africa.

The eventual passing of the Slave Trade Act 1807 was not Wilberforce’s first attempt to legislate against trading human lives for money. Between 1787 and 1802, Wilberforce introduced no fewer than 15 abolition bills in Parliament, all of which were defeated.

He introduced other abolitionist motions and bills which never even made it to a vote but were frustrated by parliamentary procedure and minor inconveniences such as wars with France, the death of colleagues, constitutional upheaval, etc.

The opportunity to end the slave trade was presented to Parliament, on average, once a year, every year, for 15 years. And the majority of British MPs voted to continue the trafficking of humans. Every time.

Let slip the dogs of war

Prior to the 1800s, Great Britain and France had been engaging in consistently dramatic disagreements, to the extent that we had a war called the Hundred Years’ War (which lasted 117 years). This ended in 1453, and we proceeded to have roughly 83 more years of war in the following 350 rotations of our planet around the great big nuclear reactor in the sky.

Things got heated (again) in 1803, when Napoleon Bonaparte, famously not a monarch, became an ideological threat to George III, infamously a monarch. The newly formed United States of America also started to not-so-subtly support the new French Republic in its efforts to dominate the various, non-republican kingdoms of Europe.¹

Great Britain took this latest war with France pretty seriously, as a matter of pride if nothing else. Also, we wanted to keep Gibraltar. We like having bits of land nowhere near England, like aristocrats owning huge chunks of Scotland.

Amid all of this imperial dick swinging, Wilberforce was scheming. If he couldn’t convince the parliamentarians of his country to abolish the slave trade, he’d have to cajole MPs to do it without them even knowing.

And so he did

Before we go any further, it’s important to briefly understand how the trafficking of humans from Africa to America by Great Britain worked.

British ships would abduct people from West Africa (who, to be fair, in some instances, were sold to the British by other West Africans, as if that makes it any better²). The British would transport humans in conditions worse than concentration camps and offload them in the Caribbean, North America and South America (to actual concentration camps), in exchange for goods such as tobacco, rum, molasses and hemp. These commodities would be brought back to British ports for sale, from which Britain profited massively and ignored the millionfold cost of human lives.

William Wilberforce spotted something in this morally deficient business model which could be exploited, with the patriotic spirit of his fellow MPs in tow: the USA was supposedly neutral in the Napoleonic Wars but, as a fledgling nation, had very little capacity for keeping a diplomatic straight face. The USA was, for all intents and purposes, supporting France in its war, and most of the ports to which British ships were trafficking Africans belonged to either the United States, France or Spain (which was at the time part of Napoleon’s First French Empire). You can probably see where this is going.

The Foreign Slave Trade Abolition Bill of 1806 was introduced in Parliament by Sir Arthur Leary Piggott, the Attorney General, to relatively little notice. It would prevent the trafficking of slaves to foreign ports, the optics being that, during a war, Great Britain shouldn’t be providing resources of any kind to its enemies.

Wilberforce and his abolitionist colleagues remained silent in Parliament during the readings of this bill, so as not to draw attention to its implications. Namely, that if Great Britain stopped trafficking humans to the Americas, there would be nowhere else for Great Britain to traffic humans.

But let us be clear: The Foreign Slave Trade Abolition Bill of 1806 was Wilberforce’s bill. It was presented as an anti-France measure, and Wilberforce and his colleagues pretended to ignore it. Anti-abolitionists didn’t even realise what the bill would really mean until its third reading in the House of Commons, when they attempted in vain to gather the votes at short notice to defeat its passing.

To Wilberforce and the abolitionists’ benefit, the recent general election had seen the introduction of 100 Irish MPs to the British Parliament, following the Acts of Union 1800. The Irish MPs were pro-abolition, and it was their votes which carried the 1806 bill.

Without the weight of Irish MPs’ votes, or the parliamentary subterfuge of Wilberforce, British politicians would have continued to endorse the trafficking of humans from Africa to America.

The Foreign Slave Trade Abolition Bill, passed on 23 May 1806, laid the groundwork for the Slave Trade Act 1807, given royal assent nine months later.

A notable opponent of the Slave Trade Act 1807 in the House of Lords was the then Duke of Clarence and St Andrews, more commonly known as King William IV.

Great Britain ended its own slave trade

But it only did so on a technicality. Our Parliament voted that Black humans were mere commodities, of which we should boycott the trade to our military foes.

We did not end the slave trade because we wanted to, because of some noble sense of obligation to atone for our past ills, but because we viewed Africans as a resource, as less than human. The bill was phrased in such a way that many anti-abolitionists abstained from voting, because to vote against the bill would have been seen as unpatriotic. It was carried across the line by Irish MPs.

The United Kingdom did not begin to abolish slavery in its own territories until 1833. For a further ten years, it allowed the private East India Company to continue the enslavement of people in the South Asian subcontinent.

Thereafter, the East India Company continued the indefinite practice of slavery under a different name: debt bondage. Indentured labour was only made illegal in 1976, nearly 30 years after India’s independence from the British Empire, by the government of Indira Gandhi, India’s first and only female prime minister.

Rue Britannia.

¹Things eventually didn’t go too well for Napoleon, but what’s a martyr without a Corse?

²IT DOESN’T.

A non-exclusive list of books regarding William Wilberforce, including his work with and continued support of Black people, emancipated or otherwise, can be found below. He was by no means perfect, but better than most of his time.

• Carey, Brycchan (2005), British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
• Cox, Jeffrey (2008), The British Missionary Enterprise Since 1700, London: Routledge
• Hague, William (2007), William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner, London: HarperPress
• Wilberforce, William (1823), An Appeal to the Religion, Justice, and Humanity of the Inhabitants of the British Empire: in Behalf of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies, London: J. Hatchard and Son
• Oxford, The Bodleian Library, Papers of William Wilberforce (1759–1833)