Parliament reenacted and expanded the Navigation system, requiring trade to move in English ships and beginning the practice of “enumerating” key colonial commodities. For sugar-producing colonies in the Caribbean, these rules tied plantation exports more tightly to English markets and shipping. This helped set the economic framework in which enslaved labor and Atlantic commerce became closely linked.
Barbados enacted a wide-ranging law to govern enslaved Africans and to formalize slavery in colonial courts. The code treated enslaved people as chattel property and became influential beyond Barbados, shaping later slave laws in other English colonies. It marked a shift toward a more fully codified plantation slavery system in the British Caribbean.
A new charter explicitly included the trade in enslaved Africans as a central goal of the Company of Royal Adventurers (later the Royal African Company). The company’s privileged position helped organize English slaving voyages and support a supply chain from West Africa to plantation colonies. This strengthened the connection between British Caribbean expansion and the forced transport of Africans across the Atlantic.
The Trade with Africa Act (often associated with 1698 implementation) opened English trade with Africa to private “separate traders,” weakening the Royal African Company’s monopoly. In practice, this helped expand participation in the Atlantic slave trade from British ports. Greater competition and volume fed labor demands in Britain’s sugar colonies.
The 1713 peace settlement gave Britain a 30-year contract (the asiento) to supply enslaved Africans to Spanish America, managed through the South Sea Company. The agreement set a quota commonly described as 4,800 enslaved people per year and also permitted a limited annual trading ship. This broadened British involvement in slave trading networks beyond its own colonies and increased the scale of Atlantic slave commerce.
Parliament imposed duties on molasses, sugar, and rum imported into North American colonies from non-British Caribbean producers. The law aimed to preserve the market position of British West Indian planters facing competition from French and other colonies. It shows how imperial policy supported plantation economies that depended on enslaved labor.
A large uprising of enslaved people began in Jamaica in April 1760 and continued into 1761. The revolt was violently suppressed, but it exposed how unstable and militarized plantation society had become. Fear of rebellion influenced later colonial policing, punishment, and political debate about the future of slavery.
In Somerset v Stewart, the Court of King’s Bench ruled that an enslaved man in England could not be forcibly detained and shipped to Jamaica for sale without clear supporting statute (“positive law”). The judgment did not end slavery across the British Empire, but it became an important legal and symbolic reference point for abolitionists. It also highlighted how slavery’s legal foundations differed between Britain and its plantation colonies.
In late 1781, the crew of the British slave ship Zong killed more than 130 enslaved Africans by throwing them overboard, later framed as a dispute over insurance payments. Court proceedings in 1783 brought the facts to wider attention, focusing on “cargo” loss rather than murder. The event became a powerful example for abolitionists of how the slave trade treated human beings as property.
Activists created the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in London, bringing Quakers and Anglicans into a coordinated, public-facing campaign. The society gathered evidence, organized petitions, and helped keep abolition on Parliament’s agenda. This shift toward sustained national mobilization helped turn moral criticism into practical political pressure.
Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act 1788 (often called Dolben’s Act), limiting the number of enslaved people that British ships could carry based on ship tonnage. The law was framed as a regulation of conditions rather than an end to the trade, and it had to be renewed in later years. Still, it marked a major change: the British state began to directly constrain how slaving voyages were conducted.
A mass uprising of enslaved people in Saint-Domingue began in August 1791 and expanded into the Haitian Revolution. The conflict shook slaveholding societies across the Caribbean, including British colonies, by demonstrating that plantation slavery could be overthrown through organized resistance. It also intensified debates in Britain about the costs and risks of maintaining a slave-based empire.
Parliament passed legislation in 1806 to prevent British subjects from importing enslaved people into colonies belonging to foreign states and to limit slave-ship outfitting connected to foreign trade. The act narrowed legal pathways for British involvement even before a full ban on the British slave trade. It helped set the stage for the more sweeping prohibition that followed.
The Slave Trade Act received royal assent on March 25, 1807, and came into effect on May 1, 1807, making it illegal to trade enslaved people within the British Empire. The law did not end slavery in British colonies, but it formally closed the legal British transatlantic slave trade that had supplied labor to West Indian plantations for generations. This created a clear endpoint for the 1660–1807 period: an empire-wide ban on slave trading, followed by long and contested enforcement and, later, emancipation.
British West Indies and the transatlantic slave trade (1660–1807)