Towards Abolition: The Final Years of the British Slave Trade, 1783-1807

Abstract

This chapter shows that the British transatlantic slave trade in its final quarter century was a thriving affair which delivered more Africans to the Americas than in any previous quarter-century period. The Caribbean remained easily the most important market region for the disembarkation of these captives. British slaving merchants always looked for the best markets from which they could garner good sales and high average prices and, in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic war years between 1793 and 1807, they were able to dispatch slaves to non-Anglophone markets in the French, Dutch and Danish Caribbean as well as to Anglophone destinations. On the eve of the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, the ‘Guinea’ traffic was still economically viable, despite abolitionist pressures, but the most important British Caribbean destination, Jamaica, was the one island where slave deliveries stood a good chance of continuing and increasing in the future: other British islands in the eastern Caribbean had reached a point in their development where fresh slave imports were not so vital owing to demographic improvements among the black population.