“The British slave system was not in decline when the slave trade was abolished. On the contrary, all the evidence suggests that the slave trade was booming after 1783 – the time when abolition thrived across Britain.

Most notably, the work of David Eltis and David Richardson in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database…is replete with confirmation that the British slave trade was booming as never before in the years after 1783.

Thus, the American Revolution inaugurated not a decline in the British slave system (and hence offering an economic argument for sup- porting abolition), but witnessed, instead, a huge spike in Atlantic slave trading.”

“the Atlantic slave trade did *not* end in 1807. Indeed, it boomed after British abolition… Almost one-quarter of all Africans transported across the Atlantic travelled in the years after British abolition.”

“Britain’s abolition of its own slave trade and, later, of its slave system was not the end of British entanglement with slavery in the Americas. After 1838, even more than in its early days of development, slavery showed all the signs of being a vigorous global economic system.

The oceanic movement of huge volumes of manufactured goods to be exchanged for Africans, the relentless flow of foodstuffs & artefacts from Europe & North America to feed the plantations & their residents, the flow of slave-grown tropical produce back to Europe and North America–

all this and more entailed massive dependent commercial, financial and agricultural systems. The end of the formal British slave system left the expansive British economy free to take advantage of the economic opportunities available across the enslaved Americas: in the US South,

in Cuba and in Brazil. Industrial capitalism rose to the challenge. We know…the degree to which British finance and manufacture thrived on this ‘illicit’ slave trade in the South Atlantic – whatever the Foreign Office and the Royal Navy might try to do to the contrary.”

excerpts from “Why Did the British Abolish the Slave Trade? Econocide Revisited”

now excerpts from The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights…

“it was not until the outbreak of a great slave rebellion in August 1791 in French Saint-Domingue that the system of the New World experienced a challenge it could not contain or suppress…

Between 1794 and 1804 the Spanish, the British and the French were each defeated by black insurgency. The defeat of Napoleon led to the proclamation of the Republic of Haiti in 1804, the first major breach in the systems of New World slavery.”

“In 1816 Haiti’s President Alexandre Pétion helped Simón Bolívar to mount the invasion that was ultimately to defeat the Spanish Empire in the Americas, giving him arms and ammunition and allowing hundreds of Haitian fighters, known as los franceses, to sail with him.

In return Bolívar promised to adopt measures to extinguish slavery in the lands he was to liberate. Bolívar had already freed his own slaves.

He was only able to persuade the Congress of Angostura in 1819 of limited measures – an end to the slave trade, and the release of male slaves who were enrolled in the liberation forces.

Against continuing opposition from many of his fellow planters, he persuaded the Congress of Cúcuta in 1821 to go further and decree that all children born to slave mothers would be free when they reached eighteen years old.

Former slaves and free men of colour were to make up a high proportion of the main liberation armies, usually between a third and a half…”

“The Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot has argued that the events leading to the foundation of Haiti have suffered from either ‘erasure’ or ‘banalization’ in general histories of the Americas and the West, because they were seen as lacking sufficient coherence and meaning.

They were merely a confused disorder that did not rise to the level of a national or social revolution. Just as Haiti was diplomatically shunned by the Great Powers – the US did not recognize it until 1862 – so scholars paid it little or no attention for at least another century.

Spanish American historiography acknowledged Haiti’s assistance to Bolívar, but general histories of the ‘age of revolution’ often dealt briefly with these liberation struggles themselves…”

“The recovery of the population of Haiti in the period 1804 to 1840 reflected a sharp drop in deaths due to overwork and the burdens placed on slave mothers.

The ending of captive arrivals from Africa reduced death from disease – though the demanding disease environment had still made a huge contribution to the losses of British and French invaders.

In the years 1791 to 1804 the ravages of war had involved heavy loss of life, but thereafter conflicts between Haitian factions were often settled by shows of force and some periods – such as 1822–43 – were largely peaceful.”

In contrast to the relative peace in Haiti, recall that where formal chattel slavery was not overthrown by force, any population "growth" was driven by 1) continued slave trading, which obscured the scale of death for some by simply "replacing" those being killed off—

never mind that the process of slave trading itself was a death machine from beginning to "end"—or 2) slave breeding, aka enforced systematic mass r*** of an entire class of people…

@threader_app compile