Ideological, doctrinal, religious and political
aspects of the African slave trade21Certainly, these cities continued to thrive after the slave trade was abolished,
but the words of British Parliamentarians and Nantes manufacturers testify
once again to their awareness of the economic significance of the slave trade :
it provided work for thousands of craftsmen and sailors; many hundreds of
people were employed in the textile mills and factories of London, Bristol,
Glasgow, Manchester, Nantes, Roanne, etc., working on raw materials from
West Indian and American plantations : products of sugar-cane, tobacco, cot-
ton, etc.
Undoubtedly, the greatest profits from the slave trade went to both
Americas. No one denies the fact that for several centuries Brazil was actually
integrally linked with Africa and that the greatest number of slaves were
imported into Brazil. But less is written of the significance of the African slave
trade for the United States of America, or of the fact that 'it was the sale of
Africans in the New World—the slave trade—that laid the financial foundation
of the United States'.^17 Nevertheless, history has preserved the testimony of
contemporaries on the importance of the slave trade for the United States
economy: when the Declaration of Independence was put up for discussion
at the Continental Congress the article denouncing the slave trade was exempted
from the text.^18
In the eighteenth century the export of slaves increased yearly. According
to the (exaggerated) data of contemporaries, in the 1780s, when the movement
for the abolition of the slave trade began to develop in Europe and America,
100,000 Africans were exported yearly.The struggle for abolition of the slave tradeViewing the events of those years from the present time one can single out the
following reasons for the abolition of the slave trade in the early nineteenth
century: the development of capitalist relations in European countries and
America in general; changes in Great Britain's economic policy—the result of
the breaking off of its Continental colonies; the impact of the French Revo-
lution with its ideas of liberation; the revolution of African slaves in Santo
Domingo; the growing number of slave uprisings in the West Indian colonies
as the result of the revolutionary events in France and Santo Domingo; the
upsurge of the abolitionist movement in nearly all the European countries.
The struggle to abolish the slave trade continued for several decades.
It acquired, to use present-day terminology, an international character and
was accompanied by sharp polemics between the abolitionists and their oppo-
nents, in the course of which there appeared many books, brochures and pam-
phlets depicting, often with pro and con exaggerations, the main ideological,
political, economic and religious views of that time on the slave trade.