“Make Slavery Great Again”

Posted on: 25 March 2025 in Posts

For nearly two decades, the United Nations has designated the 25th March an International Day of Remembrance. This annual remembrance began on 25th March 2007, which the UN had designated the International Day for the Commemoration of the Two-hundredth Anniversary of the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. But what, exactly, is the UN telling the whole world to remember, by singling out Britain’s Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, enacted on 25th March 1807?

In 1824, Elizabeth Heyrick published a pamphlet, in which she criticised the fact that ‘it is now seventeen years since the Slave Trade was abolished by the Government of this country—but Slavery is still perpetuated in our West India colonies […] Who will listen to [England’s] pathetic declamations on the injustice and cruelty of the Slave Trade—whilst she rivets the chains upon her own slaves?’

William Wilberforce was not amused. He retorted that ‘for ladies to meet, to publish, to go from house to house stirring up petitions—these appear to me proceedings unsuited to the female character as delineated in Scripture’. Clearly, this ‘lady’ from Leicester had hit upon a very raw nerve: Why had British abolitionists before Heyrick seen fit to separate, for the purposes of setting a target for abolition, slavery from a so-called “slave trade”?

In her pamphlet—titled ‘Immediate, Not Gradual, Abolition; or, an enquiry into the shortest, safest and most effective means of getting rid of West Indian Slavery’—Heyrick explained the stakes of this separation: ’Give the slave his liberty,—in the sacred name of justice, give it him at once. Whilst you hold him in bondage, he will profit little from your plans of amelioration’. Heyrick was for liberation; Wilberforce was for amelioration.

We tend to think that we can divide the world, before slavery ended, into two camps: anti- or pro-. You were either against slavery or you were for it. You either wanted and worked for slavery to be abolished, or you wanted and worked for slavery to continue. However, the division between anti-slavery and pro-slavery was not the most important cleavage in public debate. The most significant ideological divide was between those who wanted and worked to abolish Slavery and those who wanted to and worked to “improve” or “ameliorate” it.

‘”Amelioration” was a policy of sugar plantation management that sought to soften the harshest conditions of slavery—mainly for women, especially in the late pre-natal and early post-natal situation’, argued Dr Claudius Fergus, at “Undoing 2007; Preparing for 2038”—last year’s game-changing public conversation, reviewed in Museum Geographies and The Birmingham Dispatch, about Abolition, Birmingham, and Commemoration. ‘The short-term objective was to encourage pregnancy and to facilitate safe delivery and survival of the new-born—which in fact, was a Caribbean version of American “Slave-breeding”. The original long-term objective was to increase the enslaved population by natural means, to reduce the costs of production against the constantly rising costs of new imports of captive Africans. From the 1770s, “Amelioration” became increasingly associated with prospects of Abolition of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.’

In her keynote lecture last year, during the Mayor of London's seventh UNESCO Day for Remembering the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its Abolition, Dr Sasha Turner agreed: British Abolitionists ‘did more than simply advocate for the suppression of the trade in African peoples on moral grounds. Campaigners for abolition, who understood fully how Britain and its people prospered from the trade and exploitation of Africans, knew its imperative and offered a way forward for colonial investors. How might they maintain and even optimise colonial productivity and profitability after the trade had been blocked?

‘The answer? The biological reproduction of unfree workers in the colonies would be made to replace the trade in captive Africans. Wilberforce and other abolitionists argued that the cruelty towards enslaved girls and women […] made it impossible for [enslaved women] to bear enough children to replace dead and worn out enslaved workers. Enslavers had therefore come to depend on the trade in African captives because the Caribbean enslaved population could not reproduce itself. According to this reasoning, enslavers must be made to improve the living and working conditions of slavery and make it conducive for bearing and rearing children: “replacement labourers”.’

Liberation was the idea that we should “End Slavery Now!”. Amelioration was the idea that we should “Make Slavery Better!”, or “Make Slavery Great Again!”. The idea that slavery ever had been, or ever could be, “Great” strikes us as grotesque, but, in the late 1700s and early 1800s, a relatively small, yet relatively powerful, group of people—persons classed, racialised, and gendered as wealthy white men—assumed it was obvious. Wealthy White British Men planned to “Make Slavery Better Again!” by “Stopping The Boats”. Wealthy White British Men wanted to “Stop The Boats!”, so that they could “Start The Breeding!”—“Breeding” from Black Women’s Wombs.

It’s 25th March: Happy Amelioration Day.

Written by Dr Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman