The long campaign: Britain’s fight to end the slave trade

For much of the 19th century, Britain fought to suppress the trans-Atlantic slave trade, sending ships from the Royal Navy to intercept slavers along the African coast. Digitizing archival data, we show that this suppression campaign started small but grew in strength over time, eventually involving more than 14 percent of the Navy’s fleet. Exploiting the distance between slave voyages and British bases as well as when these bases were established, we find that the campaign raised the likelihood of capture among slavers but did not stop the slave trade as a whole. Instead, changes in the demand for slaves played a bigger role in ending the trade. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence that Britain persisted with its costly naval campaign for ideological reasons.