How the British slave trade ended

The black slave trade was a bloody crime committed by European colonists in modern history. Since the 1540s, Portuguese colonists have hunted black people along the coast of West Africa, or sold them back to Europe, where they worked for feudal large landowners in farming, or used the cheap labor of black slaves to establish colonies in Sao Tome, Madeira, Cape Verde, etc. Plantations were established on the Atlantic islands to produce crops for export. In the early 16th century, European colonists transported black slaves to the Americas for sale. Portugal, Spain, Britain, France, the Netherlands and other countries plundered black slaves and sold them to the Americas. In the past 400 years, no less than 15 million black people were transported from Africa to the Americas. About five times that number died in slave-hunting wars and trafficking. The total number of Africans lost was no less than 100 million able-bodied people. The crazy slave trade gradually declined from the mid-18th century to the second half of the 19th century, and was largely abolished in the 1870s.

There are three main reasons for the abolition of the slave trade:

First, the indomitable struggle of the African people and black slaves in the Americas greatly dealt a blow to the slave trade. This was the fundamental reason for the abolition of the slave trade.

From the day the colonists trafficked black people, the African people launched a heroic and tenacious struggle. On the African continent, they raised their spears, bows, arrows and stones to attack the colonial invaders head-on and severely attacked the "slave-catching teams". In the black jails of coastal colonial strongholds, black people secretly organized riots and jailbreaks. There are now 15 black uprisings in written records in the 18th century. On the slave ships sailing in the Atlantic Ocean, although the slave traders were heavily armed and took strict precautions, black people continued to launch resistance struggles. According to incomplete statistics, from 1700 to 1845, 55 black riots occurred on British and American slave ships alone.

After arriving in the Americas, the black slaves continued to hold uprisings in order to resist the barbaric slavery system and strive for their own liberation. In the United States alone, there were at least 250 large-scale slave revolts in the more than 40 years after 1819. These struggles fundamentally attacked the slave trade.

Second, starting from the late 18th century, with the development of capitalist economy, Western capitalist countries changed the way they exploited colonies, demanding that Africa be turned into a commodity sales market and a source of raw materials.

In the 1760s, the Industrial Revolution first began in Britain. By the first half of the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution spread to other capitalist countries. In order to meet the needs of the rapid development of productivity after the industrial revolution, capitalist countries need to turn overseas colonies, including Africa, into industrial product sales markets, raw material production areas, and even places for capital export. They recognized that keeping Africans in enslavement in Africa was risk-free and would yield profits that far exceeded those gained from the slave trade. Therefore, Western capitalists gradually lost interest in the slave trade. In the early 19th century, after the British colonist Owen visited East Africa, he strongly advocated the abolition of the slave trade and the local utilization of local resources. He said: "These new resources will be opened up for our country's enterprises and industries."

In fact, , as early as 1787, the British sent more than 300 blacks and 76 white women and children to St. George's Bay in Sierra Leone, purchased land, settled the immigrants, and established the town of Granville. In 1808, the British turned Sierra Leone into a crown colony. The United States also followed the British example and purchased a piece of land in Cape Methlado in 1822, and sent blacks liberated from slavery here to establish a settlement, later called Monrovia, and established Eddy in succession nearby. Na, Marshall, Buchanan, Greenville, Sinoe, Maryland and other immigrant areas. In 1824 the new colony was called Liberia. By the late 19th century, in the process of transition to imperialism, European colonial countries set off a climax of carving up Africa. In just a dozen years, they occupied almost all of Africa.

Third, the victory of the Haitian Revolution, the Latin American War of Independence, and especially the victory of the North in the American Civil War greatly reduced the scale of the slave trade.

In 1791, an uprising broke out in the French colony of Haiti, and Toussaint Louverture led the Haitian people to abolish slavery. In 1804, Haiti won its independence. In the early 19th century, national independence movements broke out in Latin America. After hard struggles, the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Latin America were basically independent by 1826. This led to most Latin American countries promulgating laws to abolish or restrict slavery, which was a heavy blow. the slave trade.

In the American War of Independence from 1861 to 1865, southern slave owners suffered defeats, slavery was abolished, and the plantation economy suffered a severe blow. Subsequently, the slave trade gradually ceased.