3.1 Black Britain and the road to emancipation c1730-1833

Question 1

Emancipation

Answer 1

Freedom

Question 2

Activist

Answer 2

People who campaign to bring about change

Question 3

Abolitionists

Answer 3

People who campaigned to end slavery

Question 4

Freedom of the City

Answer 4

Awarded to young men after completing 7 years of an apprenticeship. Black men were forbidden from becoming apprentices

Question 5

The Somerset Case 1772

Answer 5

The Somerset judgement held that chattel slavery was unsupported by the common law in England and Wales. However, slavery was not illegal, only it did not legally exist in England and the only way to make it exist would be to pass a law creating it.

Question 6

How many Black people lived in England at this time?

Answer 6

Estimated 10,000, and formed 1 per cent of the population

Question 7

Give three examples of occupations Black people held

Answer 7

• Teacher
• Pub manager
• Priest

Question 8

Explain how Black British people were involved in political action in the period before the emancipation of enslavement

Answer 8

One way Black people were involved in political action was by joining the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade and publishing their experiences of enslavement. Oladuah Equiano worked with abolitionists such as Thomas Clarke to promote the rights of Black people across Great Britain.

Another way Black people were involved in political action was by becoming radical political activists. Robert Wedderburn became a leading member of the Spencer movement, which called for the sharing out of private land and an end to slavery and for religious tolerance. There was also a peaceful protest in Manchester in 1819, known as the Peterloo Massacre - fifteen people were killed and 400-700 injured.

Question 9

The end of the slave trade

Answer 9

• In 1807, the parliament passed a law making the slave trade illegal (in large part a response to the revolution by enslaved Africans in the French colony of St Domingue)
• Some British slave traders continued transporting Africans to the Americas using false documents.
• The Royal British Navy operated anti-slavery patrols, but very few ships were appointed to monitor this until the 1840s
• The trade flourished until slavery was finally abolished in Brazil in the 1880s.
• Slave rebellions, often put down violently by the army, took place all over the British West Indies: in Barbados in 1816, Guyana in 1823 and Jamaica in 1831
• Following the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, emancipation came in 1838
• Huge amounts of money (over £1 billion in today’s money) were paid in compensation, not to the freed slaves but to the plantation owners

Question 10

Reasons for the success of the abolition movement

Answer 10

• Hard work in parliament of men such as William Wilberforce
• Well organised campaigns of petitions and boycotts
• Uprisings on the plantations made it clear that the system of profit from trade based on slave labour could not continue

Question 11

Cato Street Conspirators

Answer 11

A group of radical political activists who secretly plotted to assassinate the prime minister and his cabinet. These ‘Cato Street Conspirators’ were betrayed and executed.

Question 12

Who came and why?

Answer 12

• Some Africans were brought from the Americas by their owners to work as servants
• Others may have arrived independently or have been brought directly from Africa, some were born in Britain
• After American independence, enslaved Africans who were freed when they fought for Britain in the American War of Independence were unable to stay in the new USA and a few came to Britain

Question 13

How did Britain’s relationship with the wider world affect African immigration?

Answer 13

• The triangular trade in enslaved Africans involved the purchase of millions of women, men and children and their transportation to the Americas in a mass forced movement across the Atlantic
• The lives of Black people in Britain were deeply affected by this

Question 14

What was their impact?

Answer 14

• Some Black people played a key role, as writers or activists, in the abolition of the read in enslaved Africans and later of slavery in the Caribbean
• They and the other abolitionists had considerable impact and helped to inspire later protest movements such as the Chartists
• The majority of Black people worked as domestic servants and seamen
• Together they had a hidden impact, doing the labour that freed the wealthy to run the country and profit from slavery and empire