Empire, industry and abolition
History · Key Stage 3 · The School
The transatlantic slave trade
Between the 16th and 19th centuries, an estimated 12 million Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic; roughly 1.8 million died on the Middle Passage. Britain was among the largest carriers. Enslaved people resisted continually — revolt, escape, sabotage and the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, which established the first state founded by formerly enslaved people.
Abolition, and who did it
Britain abolished the trade in 1807 and slavery in most colonies in 1833. Campaigners like Wilberforce and Clarkson mattered; so did Olaudah Equiano's own testimony, mass petitions, sugar boycotts, and above all resistance in the Caribbean that made the system expensive and unstable. Naming only Parliament, or only the enslaved, gives you half the picture. The £20 million paid in compensation went to slave OWNERS, not to the enslaved — a fact worth knowing.
Judging the past
Historians disagree about empire's economic role, its costs and its legacies, and those disagreements are genuine rather than a matter of opinion polls. Good practice: state what is well evidenced, name where interpretations differ and why, and avoid both celebration and a verdict delivered as if no one could dissent. That is what an examiner wants and what the subject requires.
Trace it backwards from a Bristol teacup in 1780. It came by ship from Jamaica; it was grown and cut by enslaved people on a plantation; the plantation was bought with credit from a British bank; the ship that carried the sugar had carried manufactured goods to West Africa and people from West Africa to the Caribbean. The teacup, the bank, the factory and the plantation are one system — which is what made abolition so hard to win.