The Slavery Abolition Act ends slavery across the British Empire

Date

28 August 1833 (in force 1 August 1834)

Category

Politics & governance

Region

British Empire (Caribbean, Mauritius, Cape)

Era

Modern

Significance

Receiving royal assent on 28 August 1833 and taking effect on 1 August 1834, the Slavery Abolition Act abolished slavery throughout most of the British Empire, freeing some 800,000 enslaved people, chiefly in the Caribbean, Mauritius and the Cape.

The Act followed the 1807 ban on the slave trade and was driven by a revived abolitionist movement, the influence of formerly enslaved campaigners, and large-scale resistance in the colonies, notably the 1831 Baptist War in Jamaica. Emancipation was neither immediate nor unconditional: enslaved people over the age of six were reclassified as unpaid 'apprentices' bound to their former owners, a system of forced labour that provoked further protest and was wound up early in 1838. Crucially, the British government paid £20 million in compensation, an enormous sum, to slaveholders for the loss of their human 'property', while the freed people received nothing. The Act nonetheless ended the legal status of slavery across a vast empire and became a model invoked by abolitionists worldwide, even as plantation economies adapted by importing indentured labourers from India and elsewhere.

Empires active in 28 August 1833 (in force 1 August 1834)

• Russian Empire
  1721 CE to 1917 CE
• British Empire
  1583 CE to 1997 CE
• Qing Dynasty
  1636 CE to 1912 CE
• French Colonial Empire (Second)
  1830 CE to 1962 CE
• Spanish Empire
  1492 CE to 1976 CE
• Portuguese Empire
  1415 CE to 1999 CE

Related politics & governance events

• The Revolutions of 1848 (the Springtime of Peoples)
  1848 to 1849
• Congress of Vienna and the Concert of Europe
  September 1814 to June 1815
• Commodore Perry forces the opening of Japan
  1853 to 1854 (Treaty of Kanagawa, 31 March 1854)
• Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the birth of the British Raj
  1857 to 1858 (rebellion); Government of India Act 2 August 1858
• Britain abolishes the transatlantic slave trade
  25 March 1807
• Garibaldi's Expedition of the Thousand and the Kingdom of Italy
  May to September 1860; Kingdom of Italy proclaimed 17 March 1861

Further reading

Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire

The wider story

Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire

Roger Crowley

Fast-paced narrative of Portugal's seaborne empire.

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