Gorée is a small island off the coast of Dakar, Senegal. Enjoying an exquisitely grilled filet de saint pierre in one of the harbour restaurants as the sun sets, it is easy to imagine the place as a summer resort for the West African rich and famous. But below its serene exterior lies a dark history.

On 27 June 2013 one of the descendants of the people who suffered under this dark history recounted her visit.

How was consumption able to rise so dramatically before the age of the Industrial Revolution? The consumer revolution was the result of incremental changes in urban growth, agricultural specialization, commercial development, and proto-industry. Global trade was also a major factor. While agriculture, industry, and intra-European trade expanded gradually in the eighteenth century, intercontinental trade between Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas soared, expanding the horizons of the European material world. Global trade introduced European consumers to an array of products from distant lands, from Chinese porcelain and tea to Indian cotton textiles to American tobacco, coffee, chocolate, and sugar. Slavery was integral to global trade. On the west coast of Africa, European merchants traded Indian cloth for human captives, whom they shipped to the Americas in the largest forced migration in human history. In the Americas, European-descended enslavers brutally forced the enslaved to produce large quantities of commodities (tobacco, sugar, and coffee) for European consumption. Global trade also gave rise to import substitution as Europeans producers made cheap imitations of Asian porcelain and textiles. Such import substitution was part of a broad shift from the consumption of high-quality, durable materials that stored value over long periods of time to cheaper, more fragile semidurables that were rapidly replaced. This shift marked the birth of modern materiality and accelerated the fashion cycle.

This form of international cooperation offered completely new possibilities for the suppression of a system of human trafficking that operated across oceans and continents, but at the same time it conflicted with the interests of particular states and their own mutual rivalries and on several occasions threatened to founder on the limitations imposed by national sovereign rights. Alongside the viability of the agreed measure, then, Chapter 6 looks at the diplomatic wrangling by which the British government tried to secure treaty obligations from as many states as possible and to overcome massive political resistance, notably from Spain, Portugal, Brazil, France and the United States. Yet this decades-long process of negotiation produced a mounting international consensus, particularly from the mid-1840s onwards, condemning slavery as a ‘crime against humanity’. One telling sign of this new moral climate was the emergence of one of the first international treaty regimes, which extended from Europe across North and South America and the Arab World to East and West Africa. Its foundational idea was to enforce an agreed humanitarian norms by military means if necessary. The fight against the slave trade, it is argued, gave rise to a new conception of intervention, and abolitionism became established as a key international guiding norm for ‘civilisational’ action in the long nineteenth century.

Chapter 5 begins by briefly looking at the British Slave Trade Act of 1807, which also marked the beginning of the Royal Navy’s operations off the coast of West Africa. It concentrates on the developments that led from a national ban and its unilateral military enforcement by the United Kingdom to its international and multilateral implementation. A crucial turning point is marked by the Congress of Vienna, at which the political pressure built up by the abolitionists was so great that, for the first time, the proscription of the slave trade was jointly proclaimed and enshrined as a humanitarian norm in international law. This interdict then formed the point of reference for a series of highly controversial negotiations between the European states to decide on collective measures to be taken against this border-crossing problem. A bilateral approach between Britain and the continental powers finally resulted in a mechanism for implementation to be set up, which consisted of a previously unheard of combination of military and legal measures and which, in the shape of the Mixed Commissions for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, produced one of the first forms of international jurisdiction.

Chapter 4 focuses on the struggle against the Atlantic slave trade and the emergence of a humanitarian understanding of intervention. It begins by briefly outlining the system of the transatlantic traffic in slaves, which, by reducing human beings to a mere commodity in a circular trading system, constituted one of history’s worst humanitarian disasters. One of the central concerns of the abolitionists, who towards the end of the eighteenth century grew from a small cohort of well-connected activists to a mass movement, was to reverse this process of dehumanisation and render slaves visible in public discourse as fellow human beings who were suffering and in need of help. The focus is thus placed on the successful humanitarian mobilisation of the public by means of a targeted ‘humanitarian narrative’ and an unprecedented combination of multifarious instruments of appeal. For strategic reasons, the abolitionists concentrated their efforts on the slave trade, which was to be terminated by means of state intervention. A close interlinkage of mobilisation in parliament and civil society can be observed here, for the activists used petitions and legislative initiatives in their attempts to make their cause the official policy of the British government. In doing so, the abolitionists were the first to link humanitarianism with the policy and practice of state intervention.

In 1760, Anna Maria Lopes de Brito, knowing that she was suffering from a life-threatening disease, made the necessary preparations for her death. Brito registered a will, where she identified herself as a native of the Coast of Mina, in Africa. She also revealed that her owner “mercifully” freed her and her husband, “for which reason they married each other,” and that the couple had built a modest estate through gold mining. Finally, Brito declared that, as a member of the black brotherhood of Our Lady of Rosario, her body would be buried in the brotherhood’s chapel, where masses would be celebrated for the benefit of her soul’s salvation. The records Anna Maria Lopes de Brito left behind reveal something of the life of a freed African woman in colonial Brazil’s slave and mining society. Brito’s freedom was marked by limitations she faced in her choice of life partner, occupation, and social relationships. Still, Brito used different legal resources available to her to secure in death some of the benefits freedom had to offer: the care of her community for her well-being in the afterlife, and the assurance that the fruits of her labor would continue to benefit her children.

Chapter 2 focuses on the international slave trade clause and the fugitive slave clause. The Constitution permitted Americans to ply that “infamous traffic” for two decades, but the Founders hoped that American slavery would end after the slave trade ceased to supply new chattels. Instead, the American slave population expanded. In the 1850s, a small band of fire-eaters tried to overturn the federal ban on the slave trade. In a couple of notorious cases, Southern juries refused to convict slave traders despite overwhelming evidence of their guilt. At the same time that these slave traders brought the slave trade clause to the fore, enslaved persons did the same for the fugitive slave clause, making it the most contentious of the Constitution’s compromises over slavery. While all Southerners and many Northerners agreed that the return of fugitive slaves was a constitutional duty, some abolitionists shirked this obligation and a tiny minority actively flouted the law. Northern juries declined to convict slave rescuers. The actions of the slave rescuers and the slave traders called into question the commitment of the North and the South to the rule of constitutional law.