western Africa
These three themes are closely interwoven in the course of events in Africa. It should be noted, however, that the major decisions regarding the abolition of the slave trade were taken outside Africa and were responses to economic and political changes and pressures in Europe and America. Many of the Christian churches had never accepted the morality of trading in human beings, and the 18th-century Evangelical movements in Protestant Europe led to open campaigning against the Atlantic slave trade and also against the institution of slavery itself. These things were equally condemned by new secular currents of thought associated with the French Revolution. Because plantation production in tropical America was no longer as profitable a field for investment by northern Europeans as industry, or as trade with other parts of the world, the propaganda against the slave trade began to take effect. Denmark outlawed slave trading by its citizens in 1803, Great Britain in 1807, the United States in 1808, Sweden in 1813, the Netherlands in 1814, and France (for the second time) in 1818. The most significant of these actions against the slave trade was that of Britain. British ships had been ... (200 of 32,618 words)The abolition of slavery