Imperial Reform and the 1792 Abolition of the Danish Slave Trade

In 1792, Denmark became the first European country to declare an abolition of its Transatlantic Slave Trade, which was to come into effect in ten years-time. In the interim, however, the state opened the previously monopoly-controlled slave trade to all Danish nationals, even offering subsidies to maximize the number of enslaved Africans transported to Danish colonies before the ban would cut off their labor supply.

Existing literature on the Danish abolition decision has explained it either as motivated by humanitarian sentiments, or as a calculated response to guard Danish imperials interests, in expectance of the large-scale reconfiguration of the Atlantic Slave Trade system that was expected to follow a British abolition.

Existing scholarship on this landmark decision has framed it either as a humanitarian gesture or as a strategic move to safeguard Danish imperial interests in anticipation of a broader restructuring of the Atlantic slave trade, particularly in response to a potential British abolition.

While this paper does not reject these interpretations outright, it shifts the focus beyond the immediate deliberations of the commission that recommended abolition to explore the broader context of Danish overseas trade in the 1780s and early 1790s. In the years leading up to the slave trade ban, Danish authorities dismantled long-standing trade monopolies in Iceland and Finnmark and debated ending the Greenland trade monopoly. At the same time, they pursued extensive agrarian reforms at home. These policies reflected a new political-economic paradigm centered on free trade and free labor, which contrasted sharply with the natural-knowledge-based economic thinking that had previously dominated imperial governance. Thus, I argue that to fully understand Denmark’s slave trade abolition we must situate it within these shifts in economic thought, as well as the geopolitical realities facing Atlantic Empires after the end of the American War of Independence in 1783.