Liverpool and the Slave Trade
At the heart of the institution of slavery was the
TRIANGULAR TRADE. This trade started with ships being loaded in Bristol or
Liverpool with goods such as salt, cloth, weapons, hardware, beads and rum.
These ships, known as slavers, would then sail south to the west coast of
Africa, to modern day Sierra Leone, Senegal and Nigeria. When they landed in
Africa, the captains traded these goods with African chiefs who gave the
slavers able bodied men and women in return.
The slaves were loaded into the holds of the ships and
transported across the Atlantic to America. This part of the trade was known as
the middle passage and about 25% of the slaves died during the voyage. They
were crammed together in the hold with no room to move, no sanitation and they
were kept in chains. those who died were hastily thrown over the side into the
sea. The voyage ended in the slaves being sold to the plantation owners of the
West Indies, and the southern states of the USA.
When the slavers had emptied their holds of slaves were then
filled with sugar, molasses, tobacco, rum and cotton. The ships now sailed back
to Bristol and Liverpool where the whole process began again. Many fortunes
were made in Bristol and Liverpool and at least one Prime Minister's family
fortune was built on the triangular trade.
It has been estimated that perhaps as many as 10 million
Africans were supplied to America from Africa over period of 400 years.
The triangular pattern of the slave trade helped it to grow
quickly. The money made from selling the products of slave labour in Europe was
invested in further slave trading voyages. These then supplied plantations with
more slave labour with which to produce more crops such as sugar, coffee,
tobacco, rice and later, cotton.
Background to the Slave Trade
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| A reconstruction of the cramped space slaves travelled in |
Between 1700 and 1800, Liverpool in north-west England was
transformed from not much more than a fishing village into one of the busiest
slave-trading ports in the world and thence into a general trading port and
city without peer in the 19th and 20th Centuries.
An estimated 15 million Africans were transported as slaves
to the Americas between 1540 and 1850. Ships from Liverpool accounted for more
than 40% of the European slave trade. The town and its inhabitants derived
great wealth from the trade. It laid the foundations for the town's growth. It
is no exaggeration to say that the grand buildings which grace Liverpool's
waterfront and inner heart today were built with the blood money of slavery. In
order to understand how and why Liverpool flourished in this way, it is
necessary to explain something about the nature of the Slave Trade.
After the European discovery of the Americas and West
Indies, land was distributed to Europeans who founded plantations to grow
commodities much sought after back home. These included sugar, tobacco and
cotton. In order to produce goods at a profitable rate, cheap labour was
required to work the plantations. At first, the native people of America and
the West Indies were used as slaves but overwork, disease and ill-treatment led
to serious labour shortages. Attempts were then made to obtain labour from
Ireland and England. English servants could gain free passage and the promise
of land, by agreeing to be bound to an employer
for a set number of years, but few took up the offer.
Why Slaves From Africa?
Europeans were trading in Africa as well as the New World.
Slavery already existed in Africa, where tribes enslaved people from other
ethnic groups, as prisoners of war, in payment for debt or as a punishment for
crimes. African slaves started to be shipped to the plantations in the
Americas. To meet the increasing demand from European traders, there was a
marked increase in the numbers of wars, raids and kidnapping of individuals,
particularly on the west coast. Landowners in the Americas quickly concluded
that African slaves were more suitable than the English or Irish. The reasons
usually stated for African slaves being preferred is that they could easily be
bought from traders on the West African coast and were more immune to disease
than indigenous Americans or imported white slaves. Although there is some
truth in these arguments, the main reason was that Africans made good slave
labourers because many of them were skilled artisans. However the hard life of
a slave meant nearly one-third of all slaves dying within three years, creating
a constant demand to replace them. Thus started a notorious period in British
and American history: that of the Slave Trade.
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| A Slave Ship |
The struggle to end the transatlantic slave trade and
slavery was achieved by African resistance and economic factors as well as
through humanitarian campaigns.
The most prominent abolitionists, notably Thomas Clarkson
and William Wilberforce, were great publicists. Wilberforce (1759-1833) led the
British parliamentary campaign to abolish the slave trade and slavery.
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| ‘Portrait of William Roscoe’ |
Opinion in Europe was also changing. Moral, religious and
humanitarian arguments found more and more support. A vigorous campaign to
achieve abolition began in Britain in 1783 and also developed in North America
and the Caribbean, often led by the Black churches. In Britain, Thomas Clarkson
(1760-1846) was another prominent campaigner who was principally responsible
for collecting evidence against the trade. Clarkson was a founder member of the
society for effecting the abolition of the slave trade in 1787. In Liverpool,
William Roscoe was one of the best known abolitionists. He wrote poetry and
pamphlets in favour of abolition. Opinion in Liverpool was generally
pro-slavery and like other abolitionists, Roscoe tended to work behind the
scenes rather than openly declaring his views. An active counter campaign was
mounted by those who profited from slavery. The West India lobby of plantation
owners and their supporters in the British Parliament fought abolition.
Although ultimately unsuccessful, they gained 20 million pounds compensation
for plantation owners for the loss of their slaves. Ex-slaves were not
compensated. Despite the abolition of slave trading by Britain and other countries
from 1807 onwards, illegal trading continued for a further 60 years. About a
quarter of all Africans who were enslaved between 1500 and 1870 were
transported across the Atlantic in the years after 1807. Much of this illegal
trade was to the sugar plantations of Cuba and Brazil.
For more information about Liverpool and the Slave Trade
visit
Liverpool Museums
International Slavery Museum
Slave Trade publications
Liverpool Museums
International Slavery Museum
Slave Trade publications
