1562 – John Hawkins leaves Britain on first British slave trading voyage
1607 – First successful British settlement in America
1623 – First British settlement in the Caribbean
1640 – Dutch planters from Brazil introduce sugar cane and African slaves to Barbados
1672 – Royal African Company formed to regulate the English slave trade. Monopoly over African coast from the Sahara to the Cape of Good Hope.
1698 – The monopoly ends and the trade is opened to private traders.
1713 – Treaty of Utrecht. Britain has the sole right to import unlimited numbers of enslaved people to the Spanish Caribbean for 30 years.
1760 – Slave revolts in Jamaica with lots of lives lost.
1765 – Granville Sharp begins legal challenges to British slave trade with the case of Johnathan Strong. Abolition cause begins to gather momentum.
1782 – Letters of Ignatius Sancho are published. First prose published in Britain by an African.
1786 – Thomas Clarkson’s ‘An Essay on Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species’ is published.
1787 – Abolition Committee formed.
1790 – Wilberforce’s first Abolition Bill is rejected by Parliament.
1791 – A slave uprising in St Domingue triggers the Haitian Revolution led by Toussaint L’Ouverture.
1799 – Slave Trade Act. Slave trading restricted to London, Bristol and Liverpool ports.
1802 – West India Dock in the Port of London opens dealing solely with the produce from the West Indies.
1804 – St Domingue declared the Republic of Haiti, the first independent black state outside Africa.
1807 – Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. Ships found trading could be seized and their masters and owners could be fined. Africans ‘freed’ from such ships were not actually free but were enlisted in the Army or Navy and women and children were apprenticed as labourers and domestics. This act did not abolish slave ownership.
1816 – Barbados Revolution slave rebellion
1817 – Treaty with Spain to abolish the slave trade. An attempt to police the Act which was soon followed by treaties with Portugal and the Netherlands. All nations could seize ships of any nationality found illegally trading slaves.
1831-32 – Christmas Rebellion, Jamaica
1834 – Slavery officially abolished but only children under 6 were immediately freed, all other slaves bound as apprentices for a further six years under the 1833 Emancipation Act. Colonial planters awarded 20 million pounds in compensation.
1838 – Abolition of the apprenticeship clause after political and public pressure.
1843 – Indian Slavery Act abolished slavery in the East Indies
Researched and Authored by Katharine Stimson
References:
Draper, N. ‘Slave ownership and the British country house: the records of the Slave Compensation commission as evidence.’ in Slavery and the British Country House. Dresser, M. and Hann, A. eds., English Heritage, 2013, pp.17-28.
Walvin, J. ‘Slavery’ in An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age. British Culture 1776-1832. OUP, 1999, pp.58-65.
The National Archives. ‘Slavery: British Atlantic Slave Trade’, Research Guides. Accessed 25/05/2020, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/slavery/research-guides.htm
The Legacies of British slave-ownership: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/
The Slave Voyages Database: https://www.slavevoyages.org/
The Former British Colonial Dependencies, Slave Registers, 1813-1834 can also be searched on Ancestry and provide lists of the numbers and names of slaves on various plantations.