The aftermath of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars included an increasing public detestation of slavery and the slave trade, an increase in piracy, and several wars of liberation in South and Central America, all of which affected both the societies in the West Indies and the operations of the Royal Navy. The islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe were returned to France as part of the peace process in 1814, though there was a need for a naval intervention at Guadeloupe in 1815 when a partisan of Napoleon – Admiral Linois – came to power during the emperor's ‘hundred days’, and had to be suppressed and removed. The Dutch and Danish islands were similarly returned.

In South and Central America fighting between Spanish forces and local rebels continued for ten years. This involved the Royal Navy in the West Indies because it was the practice of both sides to license privateers as a means of securing funds for their military operations, and, given that British ships were the commonest merchantmen in the seas, they were the obvious targets and had to be protected. Add to this the British government's campaign to suppress the slave trade, and intermittent crises, and there were plenty of tasks for the navy's ships to do.

The Caribbean was one of the major vortices of these conflicts, which were not entirely separate from one another. The slave trade was only illegal for British, Danish, and United States ships in 1815, and one of Britain's constant diplomatic preoccupations was to persuade other countries whose ships and sailors participated in the trade to join in its abolition, and then to intercept the slaving ships which ignored this prohibition. This meant constant patrolling off West Africa to suppress the trade, but also the supervision and interception of slave ships reaching Cuba, where slavery still existed and where the plantation economy grew greatly during the nineteenth century.

The international complications and administration of the campaign against the trade became steadily more complex, with courts involved and conflicts for the next half-century.

Closely connected with the suppression of the slave trade were campaigns against piracy, a practice which reappeared whenever there were conflicts at sea from whatever cause. Especially investigations had to be made regularly into the use of the creeks and inlets of Cuba which were often used as pirate bases.