This lesson turns on a paradox. In 1787 the transatlantic slave trade was booming. British ships carried more enslaved Africans across the Atlantic than those of any other nation, and the trade made fortunes in Bristol, Liverpool and London. Yet just twenty years later, in 1807, Parliament abolished it. Within a few years the Royal Navy was patrolling the West African coast to stop other countries’ slave ships. How did Britain go from poacher to gamekeeper so quickly?
This more challenging enquiry asks pupils to go beyond listing and sorting causes and to think about the dynamic of change. Which factors sped abolition up? Which had the most direct impact, and which were only background influences? Pupils weigh campaigners, enslaved resistance, religion, economics and politics against one another, and use the chronology to decide what really tipped the balance. Along the way they find that historians, including those writing
