The Anti-slave Trade Campaign in Europe, 1888–90

Abstract

The Brussels Conference Act of 1890 is a footnote in nineteenth-century imperial history. Its proclaimed aims—to eradicate the slave trade, to prohibit the importation of arms, and to regulate the consumption of liquor in Africa—seem either cynical or naïve when viewed in the context of the violent wars, brutal labour regimes, and economic exploitation which characterized the European conquest of Africa. Given that its promises and spirit were honoured more in the breach than in the observance, the gathering of the diplomats from Europe, the United States, and leading Muslim powers in Brussels in late 1889 and 1890 appears to have been little more than a talking shop. Yet the event in Brussels was significant in that it was the first diplomatic meeting of the major European powers devoted solely to the suppression of the slave trade. Diplomats recognized that the conference had a different character to the other great diplomatic set-pieces of the late nineteenth century: the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and the conference on the partition of Africa in Berlin in 1884/5.¹ The Brussels Conference resulted from a brief, but intense, popular anti-slave trade campaign in Europe in 1888 and 1889. Its legacy in putting anti-slavery issues on the international political agenda was evident in the 1926 League of Nations Slavery Convention, which noted that the “signatories of the General Act of the Brussels Conference declared that they were equally animated by the firm desire to put an end to the traffic in African slaves”.