The Slave Trade Act 1807, officially An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom prohibiting the slave trade in the British Empire. Although it did not abolish the practice of slavery, it encouraged British action to press other nation states to abolish their own slave trades. It took effect on 1 May 1807, after 18 years of trying to pass an abolition bill.
William Wilberforce, the leader of the British campaign to abolish the slave trade.
Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville by Sir Thomas Lawrence
Wedgwood anti-slavery medallion created as part of anti-slavery campaign by Josiah Wedgwood, 1787.
The Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people, mainly to the Americas. The outfitted European slave ships of the slave trade regularly used the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage, and existed from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The vast majority of those who were transported in the transatlantic slave trade were from Central and West Africa who had been sold by West African slave traders to European slave traders, while others had been captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids; European slave traders gathered and imprisoned the enslaved at forts on the African coast and then brought them to the Americas. Except for the Portuguese, European slave traders generally did not participate in the raids because life expectancy for Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa was less than one year during the period of the slave trade. Portuguese coastal raiders found that slave raiding was too costly and often ineffective and opted for established commercial relations.
Reproduction of a handbill advertising a slave auction in Charleston, British Province of South Carolina, in 1769
Portuguese mariners used caravel ships and traveled south along the West African coast and colonized Cape Verde in 1462.
Noah curses Ham by Gustave Doré - The Curse of Ham was used as a justification to enslave Africans.
A depiction of enslaved people transported across the Sahara desert