![]() This was an informal network of people, organizations, hiding places, homes, routes, transportation networks and tactics that supported freedom seekers in their clandestine escape from slavery. The abolition of slavery allowed the British colonies in North America to become a destination for escaped enslaved people in the United States who made their way North via the famous Underground Railroad. Notably, Prince Edward Island had already pronounced the complete abolition of slavery in 1825. The overall practice of slavery was abolished everywhere in the British Empire in 1834. But it didn’t outlaw holding and exploiting enslaved people. This made it illegal to buy or sell human beings and so ended British participation in the transatlantic slave trade. On March 25, 1807, the slave trade was abolished throughout the British Empire, including British North America. Throughout the early 1800s, courts in various colonial jurisdictions (notably Lower Canada and Nova Scotia) ruled against slave owners and freed formerly enslaved people. But even in the absence of outright prohibition, the legal status of slavery was weakening. 14Ī similar act failed to pass in Lower Canada (now Quebec) thanks to pressure from influential slave owners – including elected representatives – who blocked it. It did not free any enslaved people directly, but any enslaved person who arrived in Upper Canada would be considered free. The law made it illegal to bring enslaved people into Upper Canada and declared that children born to enslaved people would be freed once they reached 25 years of age. Upper Canada passed an Act in 1793 intended to gradually end the practice of slavery. This slave owner’s actions were entirely legal at the time, and this case seems to have inspired Simcoe to introduce the first anti‐slavery law in British North America. In 1790, a Black man named Peter Martin petitioned Governor Simcoe to act against a slave owner who had violently transported an enslaved Black woman, Chloe Cooley, from Upper Canada to the United States to be sold. The abolition of slavery in British North America It possibly enabled even more intense surveillance by white society. This meant they toiled in relative isolation, which inhibited the creation of shared community. ![]() 8Įnslaved people made up a smaller proportion of the population in early Canada than in plantation economies. There, large‐scale slave labour on plantations was a dominant force in economics, politics and culture. 7Įarly Canada is sometimes described as a “society with slaves” rather than a “slave society." At the time, much of the Caribbean and the southern United States were slave societies. John Simcoe, the first governor of Upper Canada (now Ontario), was surprised at how many colonists owned slaves when he arrived in 1792. In the late 1770s and early 1780s, Loyalists fleeing from the newly independent United States brought hundreds of enslaved Black people with them. The era of British rule saw an increase in the number of Black enslaved people in Canada. The formal agreements that ended the war affirmed the continued enslavement of Black and Indigenous people. Slavery continued after the British formally took control of New France in 1763. It was a key aspect of European imperialism and exploitation across half the world. The transatlantic slave trade was thus a distinctively colonial and white supremacist form of violence and exploitation. And yet both England and France freely enslaved millions of Black people in their faraway colonies. Slavery had been illegal in France and England for hundreds of years. The widespread violence of slave raids and kidnappings killed and displaced millions more.Įuropean colonizers held a racist double standard about slavery. At least two million more died en route across the Atlantic. More than 12 million African people were taken into slavery. In the Americas, the surviving enslaved people were sold, and goods produced by slave labour were carried back to Europe for sale. In Africa, they exchanged their goods for enslaved people. Colonial authorities and landowners forced them to serve as slave labour in the Caribbean and in North and South America.Ī pattern emerged called "triangular trade." European merchants brought trade goods from Europe to Africa. Slave traders shipped them under horrifying conditions across the Atlantic. In the 15 th century, European colonial powers began the large‐scale practice of transporting enslaved people from Africa.
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