Daily History Challenge · No. 29 · Monday 27 July 2026 · When?
Puzzle No. 29: When?
The event was The Slavery Abolition Act ends slavery across the British Empire, in 28 August 1833 (in force 1 August 1834).
The answer
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.