Christian Kern

“The Abolition of Slavery — and Its Unfinished History Slavery is far older than the transatlantic slave trade. It existed for thousands of years in societies across the Middle East, Europe, Africa and the Americas. It was therefore not invented by Europeans or white people. But another part of the history deserves recognition. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, predominantly European and Western abolitionist movements developed sustained political campaigns against the slave trade and slavery. Britain is a major example. British abolitionists such as William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp, together with Black activists and formerly enslaved people such as Olaudah Equiano, campaigned for abolition. Parliament abolished Britain’s slave trade in 1807, and slavery throughout most of the British Empire through the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, with emancipation beginning in 1834. Britain then used its navy and diplomacy to suppress the international slave trade. Between 1808 and 1870, British naval forces seized roughly 1,400 slave ships and liberated around 160,000 enslaved people. This does not erase Britain’s earlier role in the slave trade. Nor was abolition exclusively a white achievement. Black activists, former slaves, religious groups and others were important to the movement. Nevertheless, Western societies became leading forces in creating political, legal, diplomatic and military mechanisms to suppress the Atlantic slave trade and abolish slavery. And slavery has not disappeared. The latest global estimates, based on 2021 data, put the number living in modern slavery at 49.6 million: 27.6 million in forced labour and 22 million in forced marriage. About 29.3 million were in Asia and the Pacific, 7.0 million in Africa, 6.4 million in Europe and Central Asia, 1.7 million in the Arab States and 5.1 million in the Americas. Slavery is ancient and global; Europeans became major participants in the transatlantic system and later major forces in its abolition. Yet an estimated 49.6 million people were still living in modern slavery in 2021” - ChatGPT