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Remembering Slave Trade Abolitions: Reflections on 2007 in International Perspective

The papers brought together in this issue of Slavery and Abolition offer a retrospective analysis of the commemoration of the two hundredth anniversary of the Abolition of the British Slave Trade (1807/2007). Most of these articles were originally presented at the ‘Remembering Slave Trade Abolitions’ conference held in Newcastle in November 2007. This interdisciplinary conference brought together university-based scholars, museum practitioners, government advisors and others, from Barbados, Britain, Ghana, Jamaica and the United States. Looking back over a year of remembrance, as it was drawing to a close, we asked: how was slavery and abolition remembered, and by whom? What did nations, communities and individuals choose to remember, and what did they prefer to forget? What were the flashpoints for conflict, and were these successfully resolved? What choices were made, and what lessons learned, by those tasked with presenting a difficult past, and its contemporary legacy, to the public? The shipping of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic over four centuries was one of the most international processes in world history, involving people from four continents and transforming them all. The British government’s decision in 1807 to ban its citizens’ participation in the traffic did not end the slave trade, but it had significant global consequences, especially in Britain, Africa, the Caribbean, the United States and Latin America. In 2007, two hundred years after the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, British state institutions devoted unprecedented attention to the history and legacy of slavery, the slave trade and the latter’s abolition. The then-Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, convened a committee to advise him on how the bicentenary should be marked. Almost every government department organised some kind of Slavery and Abolition Vol. 30, No. 2, June 2009, pp. 161–167