The British Contribution to the Nineteenth‐Century Transatlantic Slave Trade
T HE literature on the nineteenth-century slave trade pays much more attention to the efforts of the British to suppress the traffic than to their participation in it. The sequence of events is reason enough for this. After carrying well over two and a half million slaves across the Atlantic, perhaps a third of them in the quarter-century preceding I807,2 the British not only abolished their own trade but also in the same year sent two warships to Africa to initiate a seventyfive-year naval and diplomatic campaign against the traffic of all other countries. This, moreover, was at a time when Britain's sugar colonies, unlike the British working class who helped consume their products, were experiencing high prosperity and the prospect of more to come.3 The volte face was dramatic, and this fact has not escaped historians from Lecky on, whatever their interpretation of the event. Yet the flow of British resources into the slave trade did not cease in i807. After this date British subjects owned, managed, and manned slaving adventures; they purchased newly imported Africans in the Americas; they supplied ships, equipment, insurance, and most important of all trade goods and credit to foreign slave traders.4 No doubt almost all of the Liverpool slave-ship fleet responded to "new opportunities in Central and South America and Africa",5 but indirect participation was such as to make it at least possible that British merchants cancelled out a good part of the impact of the British navy in the struggle to suppress the traffic. A fuller grasp of this double role might clarify British policy, but more important it will contribute to our sketchy knowledge of the illegal slave trade. The aim of the present study is to describe the most significant aspects, and attempt a quantitative estimate of British participation in a period when the illicit traffic was at its height. The first step is the development of a counterfactual proposition which will