"His Love of Money As Well As Humanity": Prize Money and the Suppression of the Slave Trade in West Africa, 1807–18

An emphasis on Britain’s Abolition Act has tended to eclipse its consequences in the wider empire. Slaves, under the act, could be apprenticed to British subjects for terms of seven or fourteen years, or else enlisted for life into British army regiments or into the Royal Navy. These measures were intended to ensure that the labour of former slaves remained safely in British hands; a former slave apprenticed to a British landowner could not be pressed into service on a French plantation. Moreover, the Act repurposed existing incentives for British military officers to encourage slave-trade interdiction. The system of prize money, an important financial incentive for British officers, was extended to include slaves aboard slave ships. My paper shows the consequences of this policy for international antislavery, and for the practices of British colonial government. On the coast of West Africa in the decade after 1807 – and especially at Sierra Leone, the seat of the Vice-Admiralty Court responsible for condemning slave ships and their human cargoes – the hunt for prize money shaped the practice of abolition in important ways. First, British officers’ heavy-handed zeal, driven by prize money, enraged Britain’s putative partners in anti-slavery including the United States and Portugal. After 1815, in part because of the excesses of slavetrade suppression during the Napoleonic Wars, international anti-slavery was organised around a complicated and fragile treaty system. Second, the Governors of Sierra Leone during the Napoleonic Wars came to rely on the labour of liberated slaves. Liberated slaves served as soldiers in wars against local leaders and European slave traders, and comprised the bulk of the colonial labour force. The incentives created by the system of prize money helped to create, in Sierra Leone, a new kind of British subject: free, but nonetheless wholly at the disposal of government.