Slave Trade Act
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The Slave Trade Act (citation 47 Geo III Sess. 1 c. 36) was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed in 1807 the long title of which is "An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade".
The act abolished the slave trade in the British empire. The trade had begun in 1562, during the reign of Elizabeth I when John Hawkins led the first slaving expedition.
The people who pushed the act through were a group of Evangelical Protestants allied with Quakers and united in their opposition to slavery and the slave trade. The Quakers had long viewed slavery as immoral, a blight upon humanity. By 1807 the anti-slave-trade groups had a very sizable faction of like-minded members in the English Parliament. They controlled, at their height, some 35-40 seats.
Known as the "saints" this alliance was led by William Wilberforce, the most important of the anti-slave campaigners. These parliamentarians were extremely dedicated and often saw their personal battle against slavery as a divinely ordained crusade.
Their numbers were magnified by the precarious position of the current government under Lord Grenville (his short term as Prime Minister was known as Ministry of all The Talents). Not long after the act was passed, Grenville's government lost power to William Cavendish. Despite this change, the later British governments continued to support the policy of ending the slave trade.
After the British ended their own slave trade, they felt forced by economics to press other nations into placing themselves in the same economic straitjacket, or else the British colonies would become uncompetitive with those of other nations. The British campaign against the slave trade by other nations was an unprecedented foreign policy effort. Denmark, a small player in the international slave trade, and the United States banned the trade during the same period as Great Britain. Other small trading nations that did not have a great deal to give up, such as Sweden, quickly followed suit, as did the Dutch, who were also by then a minor player.
The British navy declared that ships transporting slaves were the same as pirates, and so ships carrying slaves were subject to destruction and any men captured were (potentially) subject to execution.
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