Boycotts, Petitions, and Protest: British Abolition Efforts
Behind the protests swirling just outside the theater in Red Velvet.
Onstage at Lantern Theater Company now through October 15, Red Velvet is largely set in the midst of widespread protest. While the 1833 cast of Othello works and argues inside the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, political unrest is churning just outside their doors. The efforts to emancipate British slaves were reaching a fever pitch, and Parliament was facing enormous public pressure to abolish slavery in their colonies. What brought Britain to that point, a full three decades before the United States fought a war over the same issue?
Between 1700 and 1807, British ships transported more than three million enslaved people from West Africa to the British colonies of the Caribbean. By 1787, Britain’s first anti-slavery organization was founded — The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Within 20 years, the abolitionists had secured their first major victory: an Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in Britain, which outlawed the transport and sale of enslaved human beings across the Atlantic.
The statue outlawed the slave trade, but did not abolish the practice of slavery. That same year, the United States passed a similar law; however, where Britain imposed fines on those caught breaking the law and pressured other countries to adopt similar practices, the United States did not enforce its own law — and never applied it to the domestic trade.
The efforts to abolish slavery altogether were well underway in 1824 when Ira Aldridge arrived in Liverpool, the port from which most British slave ships had historically departed for Africa. The Anti-Slavery Society was formed in 1823, calling for an immediate improvement in conditions for colonial slaves and their eventual emancipation. While Aldridge was performing in the provinces, the anti-slavery effort was bombarding Parliament with petitions, sending more than 5,000 individual missives with more than one million signatures, all demanding the abolishing of slavery and emancipation of the enslaved. Before this effort, Parliament rarely received petitions at all.
Beyond petitioning, abolitionists also worked to undermine slavery on an economic basis. Mass boycotts of sugar from the West Indies were organized, as that trade was built upon the labor of the enslaved. Sugar sales dropped by one-third. Public pressure was so great that stores took to posting signs in their windows and on their sugar bowls, assuring customers that they did not sell sugar from the West Indies.
The societies that organized much of the movement were founded by Quakers, and the boycotts were largely successful due to the participation of women, despite the fact that they were still disenfranchised in Britain at the time. But the driving force behind much of the abolition effort was due to first-hand accounts from writers of color. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a number of currently or formerly enslaved people printed their stories, either in their own hand or as told to a writer. Books like Olaudah Equiano’s 1789 Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or, Gustavus Vassa, the African were widely read, and their release was often timed to coincide with Parliamentary debate on the topic.
Between the writings, the boycotts, the petitions, and eventually the peaceful demonstrations in the streets, the British abolition effort is considered the first popular mass protest movement in modern times. Thanks to the election of many abolitionist Members of Parliament, the push was successful. In July 1833, just three months after Aldridge’s fateful run as Othello at Covent Garden, Parliament passed the Abolition of Slavery Act, eliminating slavery gradually in the British colonies for more than 700,000 slaves in the British Caribbean.
It was not, however, a complete victory. While slavery was outlawed, enslaved people in the British colonies weren’t entirely free until 1838. The 1833 Act mandated enforced “apprenticeships” for enslaved people over the age of six, and it only freed the enslaved in the West Indies. Another round of protests and petitions calling for immediate and complete emancipation resulted in the “apprenticeships” being withdrawn in 1838. The former owners received about 20 million pounds in compensation from the government; former slaves received nothing.
It would be another five years before the slaves of the East India Company in southeast Asia were freed. And it would be 20 more years before the American enslaved would have their own freedom, just a few years before Ira Aldridge’s death in 1867.
Join us for Red Velvet at Lantern Theater Company, Sept. 7 — Oct. 15, 2017. Visit our website for tickets and information.
