Dear Editor,
May I suggest that whilst commemorating the bicentenary of the abolition by the UK Parliament of the British trans-Atlantic slave trade, we carefully consider the nature and extent of the provisions of the Slave Trade Act of 1807.
The act prohibited British subjects and residents of the United Kingdom and any of its islands, colonies, dominions, or territories, from engaging in the slave trade from the shores of Africa.
The effect of the 1807 act was that no new enslaved persons were to be shipped out of Africa by the British, but the legislation failed to prohibit the inter-colonial slave trade in the British Caribbean islands and the Americas.
This loophole enabled persons already held in enslavement in British colonies to be dealt with, traded in, purchased, sold, bartered, transferred, or subject to contracts for such transactions.
British subjects who lived in foreign countries were also beyond the scope of the legislation and were able to engage in the trans-Atlantic slave trade with impunity.
The loopholes in the legislation were exploited by a number of British slave traders, who continued trafficking in enslaved persons for many years after 1807, throughout the British West Indian Islands and the British colonies of Berbice and Demerara-Essequibo. Many enslaved persons were transferred between different colonies, eg from Barbados to Demerara, to toil on the sugar plantations.
There was also smuggling of enslaved persons throughout the Caribbean and along the Atlantic coast of South America. George Stephen in Antislavery Recollections (Lon-don: Thomas Hatchard, 1854) noted that in 1809, slave ships, under foreign flags had been fitted out in London and Liverpool in order to import enslaved persons to British colonies, via Spanish and Portuguese settlements in the Americas.
The evidence indicates that although the British trans-Atlantic slave trade was abolished, the British Caribbean-Atlantic slave trade continued for at least four decades into the 19th century. Further slave trade acts were necessary to block the loopholes. One was passed in 1824 to amend and consolidate the law, and another in 1843 to extend the provisions to British subjects, wherever they resided, whether within the British territories, or in any foreign country.
Yours faithfully,
Colin Bobb-Semple
