Disapproving of the slave trade was one thing; actively campaigning for its abolition was something different, while the passing and implementing of laws providing for its termination was something else again. People could have gone on disapproving of the slave trade for ever. What changed the situation was the awakening of the Evangelical conscience. — Howard Temperley, “March of the Saints,” TLS (17 August 2007): 8.
Britain's behaviour [in suppressing slavery and the slave trade] is particularly hard to account for. As Davis points out, the British are not thought of as having been particularly humane in other respects, including the treatment of their own working classes. . . It would appear that Britain's interests would have been best served by expanding the slave trade. . . . Instead of seeking to suppress the save trade, it could have dominated it, and in the process outproduced Cuba and Brazil, increased its own wealth, and contributed to the economic growth of the Americas. . . . In his History of European morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (1869), W. E. H. Lecky describes England's crusade against slavery as “among the three or four perfectly virtuous acts recorded in the history of nations.” . . . Davis believes that Lecky was basically right. — Howard Temperley, “Not so very free” TLS (23 June 2006): 25.
The Anti-Slavery Campaign
- Introduction
- “I shall never again visit a slave-country” — Charles Darwin on slavery
- Edmund Gabriel and the suppression of the Angolan slave trade
- Equatorial Africa — An Earthly Paradise Desolated by the Slave Trade (1881 Macmillan’s Magazine)
The Slave Trade and Particular English Cities
Suppressing the Slave Trade
- Samuel W. Baker’s “Slavery and the Slave Trade” from 1881 Macmillan’s Magazine
- Gallant capture of a Slaver by H.M.S Rattler (1849)
- Capture of a Arab slave ship by H. M. S. Penguin off the Gulf of Aden (1867)
- The Slave Trade in the Arabian Gulf — Blowing Up of a Slave Dhow in the Arabian Gulf by the Boats of the H. M. S. Spiteful (1868)
- Extract from Eneas Dallas's review of Trollope's The West Indies and the Spanish Main (1859)
- The Aftermath of Abolishing Slavery— Its Effect on Victorian Economy, Empire, and Culture: A Bibliography
The Anti-Slavery Campaign — the Visual Arts and Literature
- Josiah Wedgwood & Sons, Anti-slavery medallion
- William Gale's The Captured Runaway
- J. M. W. Turner's Slave Ship.. [Full title: Slavers Overthrowing the Dead and Dying -- Typho[on]n Coming On.
- Erasmus Darwin’s The Economy of Vegetation
- Dickens, Slavery, and Abolition
- "The Colour of Anxiety: Race, Sexuality and Disorder in Victorian Sculpture" [review of the exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute, London (2022-23)]
Hostility to the Anti-Slavery campaigns, before and afterwards
- Slavery in Black and White — an editorial cartoon from September 1865
- The Black Question — a hostile editorial cartoon from September 1865
Resources
Last modified 2 October 2022