Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade

There is no doubt that both Africans and Arabs were involved in the slave trade, but I am going to move on and say that it was not Africans and Arabs who made massive fortunes or who founded an industrial revolution out of the slave trade. The slave trade was brutalising both to the slave and the slave holder, and I want to touch on that point before closing my remarks this afternoon. As well as the sheer brutality and cruelty of the Atlantic slave trade, which lasted more than 300 years, it is important to stress how much it was part and parcel of British economic life for more than 300 years. The three great slave-holding ports were Bristol, Liverpool and London. Between 1630 and 1807, when the slave trade was abolished, 2.5 million Africans were bought and sold by Bristol slave merchants. Many of the wonderful houses, buildings and monuments that can be seen in Bristol today were built from the profits of the slave trade. As a man called Roger North, an attorney-general under James I, said of Bristol in the 17th century:"““All men that are dealers, even in shop trades, launch into adventures by sea, chiefly to the West Indian plantations and Spain. A poor shopkeeper that sells candles will have a bale of stockings, a piece of stuff for Nevis and Virginia and rather than sail, they trade in men.””" The splendours and the beauty of a city like Bristol were built on the trade in men. Liverpool was another great slave port. By the 1780s, two fifths of British slave ships were built in Liverpool. It became the largest slave ship construction site in Europe, squeezing Bristol out in the league table of slave trading ports. Huge fortunes were made from the slave trade by banks and manufacturers. To provide a few examples, there were the Heywood brothers, Arthur and Benjamin, who made their fortune in the slave trade. Arthur Heywood went on to found a bank, which became the bank of Liverpool, then Martin’s bank and eventually Barclays bank. Thomas Leyland, another huge slave trader from Liverpool, served four terms as the city’s mayor. He set up Leyland’s bank, which became Bullins bank and eventually the Midland bank. Many mayors and MPs in Liverpool were slave traders, including the Gladstones. John Gladstone was a sugar planter in Guyana, who wrote a pro-slaver column in the Liverpool Mercury and his son, of course, went on to grace this House as William Gladstone. In London, my city, people sometimes minimise or discount its involvement in the slave trade, but it was involved in it for longer and deeper than any other part of the British Isles. In the years before 1698, the Royal African Company shipped 100,000 Africans to the colonies. Fifteen Lord Mayors, 25 sheriffs and 38 aldermen were shareholders in that company. The South Sea Company traded in slaves with South America. One of the many people who made fortunes from the company before the South Sea bubble burst was Thomas Guy, a bookseller, who used his fortune to found Guy’s hospital. Barings merchant bank based its profits on the long-term procedures that it developed to finance the slave trade. In 1766, it was estimated that 40 Members of Parliament were making their money from West Indian plantations. William Beckford, MP, owned 22,000 acres in Jamaica; his two brothers and his sons were also Members of Parliament. The Bishops of London were major slaveholders in Barbados. Another major slaveholder was Humphry Morice MP, governor of the Bank of England from 1727. My point is that the slave trade was not an aberration until, kindly, people woke up and realised that it was wrong. The slave trade was part and parcel of British economic and political life for more than 300 years. I have mentioned the major ports—Liverpool, Bristol, London and Glasgow—but small ports around the country did a little slave trading too: Barnstaple, Bideford, Dartmouth, Exeter, Plymouth, Poole, Portsmouth and Whitehaven. We are not talking about an aberration that occurred on the fringes of British society; we are talking about something that was part and parcel of it for 300 years.