It is well known that the British government outlawed its part in the Atlantic Slave Trade in 1807, but maritime human trafficking continued and expanded for much of the nineteenth century. It took another quarter of a century for Britain to abolish slavery – finally in 1838 – followed by France in 1848. During that time, the Cuban and Brazilian plantation economies expanded dramatically and demand for captive African labourers continued apace. Cuba abolished slavery in 1886, and Brazil in 1888.
After the abolition of the slave trade, nearly four million men, women and children from African countries – or nearly one-third of all captives – were forced to cross the Atlantic and into lives of enslavement, in breach of national laws and international treaties. Some historians have termed this period the ‘second slavery’. We might also see it as the ‘second slave trade’.
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