hello today we're going to talk about the abolition of slavery i just thought i would start off by mentioning how important the abolition of slavery has been deemed by a lot of people that is one of the the kind of key historical events in british history and the fact that that is true is reflected in the fact that it was chosen as being uh one of the things that was commemorated on on british coins around about 10 15 years ago when the the royal man introduced an abolition of slavery two pound coin to to commemorate this this really important event and how key it was and how fundamental it was to how kind of britain views itself in the world so today we're going to talk about the abolitionist movement how it began how it was carried out and and why it perhaps took so long for the abolitionist movement to be successful so first of all that the origins of abolition are quite complicated there is a huge variety of people involved and a huge variety of of campaigns but basically when we're talking about abolition we're talking about the campaign to end the slave trade and the abolitionists are the the people who took part in this campaign so as i said a huge variety of of different reasons that it started but you can in a sense separate these into three main factors first of all humanitarian humanitarian just means to care for other people and there was a real growing belief in britain that the africans and europeans um were equal and that that white people and black people were equal and so keeping slaves was was a model and things like the zong case were really important in encouraging this view in britain and the zong case was where there was a court case involving the captain of the slave ship zong who had thrown over 100 slaves overboard due to the fact that he thought he had got lost and they may have run out of water and the slave ship owner tried to claim for those losses on insurance and there was a big debate about whether slaves were viewed as people were viewed as just kind of cargo and this kind of really kick-started a kind of moral belief in britain that actually to view people as just things was it was a big problem and so that this in many senses started to to kind of increase the visibility of abolition in britain another really big important factor was religion that there was a belief among many christians that god created everyone and because god created everyone everyone should be treated equally and one of the key groups involved in this were the quakers who were a christian group who were very very important in starting off the abolitionist movement and encouraging it to move in certain directions quakers were a religious group who had been oppressed that is kind of picked on and targeted by the government but they were very very good at organizing things they had kind of fought for their own rights and had kind of campaigned together and so they had a lot of successful methods that they had used and so they were able to transfer the successful moves from their own campaign to the campaign for the abolition of slavery and finally economic factors the there was a growing belief in britain that slavery was not as economically important as it had been they were it was an efficient way to produce goods there were better ways to produce goods and there were better things that britain could focus its economic energies on and so that began to to move people against people against slavery as well so excuse me there are a variety of methods that the abolitionists use them they're similar to a lot of protest movements protest movements that perhaps we look at in other courses such as the free last course or the great war course but also like modern day protests there are kind of two different things that protest movements do in order to achieve their aims so the first thing they do is to try and increase the visibility of their movement so that's increasing public awareness and letting people know about their campaign and second thing that they tend to do is direct action so directly targeting the the thing that they're opposing so in this case directly trying to undermine the actual institution of slavery by focusing on the legal system or focusing on the actual slave owner system itself so in terms of increasing visibility the abolitionists knew that they needed to to convince a huge number of people on the british public this labor slavery was morally wrong and the sort of methods they used to do this were holding meetings and lots of famous abolitionists were told meetings where they would go out all up and down the country and speak to various people thomas clarkson was a really good example of this he had gathered a huge amount of information by interviewing sailors who sailed on the middle passage or sailed in the triangular trade and so he knew a huge amount about the horrors that slaves had to endure and so he would provide people that his meetings with these vivid and appalling details that really kind of create this sense of outrage he also had thing called clarkson's chest which was this chest that you carried around about with him that had various examples of torture devices that were used to target slaves such as branding irons and thumb screws and fetters the sleeves were locked up in and the cat nine tails that they were they were whipped with and this this did create this real sense of outrage but also booked and direct first-hand accounts of people that experienced the slave trade for example slaves themselves such as equiano or slave ship captains like newton and these first-time accounts were very popular with the public they sold well and they gave people a real insight into what slavery was actually like there were also images there was the literacy in the 18th century wasn't as good as it is today obviously and so images are a very good way to get convey to get across an idea very simply and so wedgewood's cameo the the kind of picture that he made of the the slave that said around about am i not a man and a brother and there was also a female version that said i know i'm a woman and a sister these were really effective in in kind of creating a moral push for the abolitionist campaign it was also the famous example of the brook slave ship which is the diagram of all the slaves being stowed very tightly in this ship which many people looked at and found just very disturbing and appalling and finally poetry and song which is uh an effective protest method for has been for a hundred years or hundreds of years um so posts such as hannah moore wrote poetry that condemned slavery and john newton wrote the the famous amazing grace and these ideas were very popular and then on to the kind of the direct attack attacks itself so directly kind of targeting slavery was done in a variety of methods as well perhaps the most effective and the most famous one is the sugar boycott so that abolitionists got the the british public to refuse to buy sugar that was produced by slaves so sugar that was produced in the west indies on the caribbean this campaign was particularly targeted at women and it got a lot of women involved there was at some points around 300 000 people were refusing to buy slave produced sugar and this obviously massively hit the slave owners and where it hurts which was in the pocket and slavery has only existed in order to make money and if it stopped making money then it stopped having any point and so this economic attack was was very very effective we also had petitions again a protest method that's not very popular today but particularly in the 18th century when that a large majority of the british public couldn't vote and all women couldn't vote at that time one of the ways to be able to convince the parliament the government that the public was against something or that they felt strongly about something was to create petitions this was again a method that the quakers had used very effectively um during their own campaigns and so large numbers of petitions were produced cities signed petitions that and sent them down to parliament and by the the end of this 18th century hundreds of thousands of people would sign these petitions indicating that they were against slavery and finally the main aim of the abolitionist campaign was to change the law was to get a bill passed in parliament that outlawed the the slave trade and so william oberforce who was an mp and one of the leading abolitionists introduced the bill every year between 1789 and 1807 when slavery was finally the slave trade act was finally passed to in order to basically bans the slave trade and that this kind of continual fight this this resilience this this constant battle by wilberforce is one of the kind of important reasons why appalachian is successful and why wilberforce's name is so often linked so strongly with abolitionists now as i just said 1789 to 1807 is a long period that's a long time for someone to be constantly introducing a bill and with all the other factors going on there had to be things that were and forces that were pushing back against the abolitionists there had to be reasons why the abolitionist campaign wasn't successful or it took so long to be successful and there are quite a wide variety of these reasons um so the most important of these are that first of all employment um people in shipyards and ports and mills and factories depended on slavery for their work and so a lot of them and a lot of employers and a lot of employees were very keen for the slave trade to continue a lot of the kind of very important cities in britain glasgow liverpool bristol and london benefited significantly from the trade so a lot of them were very much against the abolitionist movement the sugar was very popular in britain as it remains today and so people worried that without the slave trade they would lose access to sugar and so a lot of people were against the possibility of abolition on that basis and was beginning to grow as a world power at this time and the economic power that it gained from slavery was seen as a key kind of pillar of the the british success and a lot of people in government and throughout the country were worried that if he took away this pillar the the kind of the building of british success would collapse the royal navy was one of the main examples of british power and though sailing on the triangular trade taught sailors important skills and sailing and maintaining ships and a lot of sailors who who had been engaged on the triangular trade were then taken to the royal navy and so the royal navy worried that without the triangular trade then they would begin to lose a significant number of the sailors also as we've said it took a long time for the bill to pass in parliament and this is partly because a large number of mps had interests in plantations they owned plantations or had shares or stock in them and other ones that didn't even own it were often bribed given money by plantation owners or slave ship owners in order to continue to support the the bill being thrown out there also were elements of the the royal family who were against abolition that the [Music] the opinions of the royal family were very important in that period and so if the royal family seem to be against something this could sway a lot of people's opinions and finally one of the the key factors is the the role of france now britain in this period and even to some extent till today had a a really strong rivalry with france and during the end of the 18th century war broke out between britain and france and because the french thanks to the influence of the french revolution were strongly committed to opposing the slave trade a lot of british people felt that they had to maintain the slave trade in order to be an opposition to france because they couldn't support something that their enemy was doing and so this issue with france led to the continuation of the slave trade to some extent so overall hopefully you can see that there are quite clear reasons that this abolitionist campaign began there were clear reasons why i was successful but there are also clear reasons that prevented its success and hopefully in that as well you can see there are clear links not just to other topics that we look at such as the civil rights movement but also to a lot of kind of protests that go on today so when you're trying to revise these things it's a very good idea to try and think about how it it kind of fits into the world that we live in and and by doing that and creating as many links as possible in your head between these these various different things that happened in the past and things that are happening today should hopefully help you remember them a little bit easier