The Royal Navy, the British Atlantic empire and the abolition of the slave trade

Abstract

British patriotic identity and British military policy were closely entwined during the eighteenth century. The navy had a prominent role in both. One eighteenth-century vision of the Atlantic empire emphasised the interconnection between maritime colonial trade and British naval strength. The argument went that British transatlantic trade, including the slave trade, constituted a nursery for British seamen and that Britain’s status as a leading European power rested on the connection between colonial commerce and naval power. For much of the century, this constituted a dominant view of the relationship between nation and empire. This chapter explores that view of empire in the contexts of new visions of British patriotism, articulated by the likes of William Wilberforce, and the abolition movement, which began to question the morality and patriotic value of defining elements of the old British empire in the Atlantic, beginning with the slave trade and the commerce in slave-grown sugar from British-Caribbean plantations.

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ORCID for Christer Petley: orcid.org/0000-0002-0616-1871

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