Amazing Grace Blog

Well I'm not quite sure how I'm supposed to write 800 words on why it took so long for the international slave trade to be ended. To me it seems to be all greed. In Amazing Grace the people trying to prevent slavery from being abolished are those who are heavily involved in it themselves, and make a great profit from it. As the film demonstrates, in the scene were Wilberforce rolls the huge scroll through parliament, there were a great many people opposed to the slave trade, but the people making the laws in parliament benifited from it, and thus were unlikely to make the slave trade illegal. the situation was the same in much of the world, the people in power benifited from slavery so much, that would not dare attack it in any way, fearing to damage their power and wealth by doing so. In some places and times they represented the majority, that is the mjority of the populace was for the slave trade, the majority supported the slave trade, but in others they were only self-serving. Even if the majority of the population had wanted to outlaw the slave trade they still needed representation in the legislature in order to manage it, and the Legislature would not do it. This is pretty simple to me. Of course there is a reason that slaves were profitable, free labor, that is. (the following has nothing to do with Amazing Grace, except that it talks about slavery, I'll get back to the movie later) I think that one of the main reasons (all based on Greed) for slavery was that there was no replacement. there was no other way to get such cheap (or free) labor. Slavery thus persisted, since there was no way to get the same output, with a comparably small input. However in the 18th century significant technological advances were made, allowing work to be done by machines rather than slaves. This was not applicable everywhere though. Agricultural based economies still required massive ammounts of slaves to function as before, and to meet the new demands for food created by the industrial revolution. This increased demand for slaves led to an increase in the slave trade, naturally people made money off of this, and didn't want to stop making it. Furthermore, the demand for slaves continued to grow, because people needed food, and factories needed raw products. Thus the slave trade became more profitable, not less as one might expect. OKay back to talking about how the movie relates to ending the international slave trade. So one of the reasons that the slave trade took such a long time to end, that I think the movie does a good job of showing, is that people didn't know how bad the slaves were treated. Or perhaps they just didn't want to know. but anyways, when they took the people by the slave ship in the movie, it seems that the people are genuinely astounded that conditions are so bad. Of course some people did know how bad the slave ships were, but most of the people who knew were part of the slave trade, and naturally did not want to endanger their occupation. But for the great many people who had no experience with the horrible conditions on slave ships, there was almost no reason to question the validity of the slave trade. Among other reasons that the slave trade was so hard to stop was the fact that there were a great many racists in the 18th and 19th centuries when slavery was in its heyday. Part of this racism was invented to create the illusion that slavery was just, and to be expected, but another, perhaps larger part of it was the result of european technological supremacy. This supremacy made the europeans think that they were better than the Africans. Europeans also believed that they had a societal supremacy too, further enhancing their sense of superiority. It would have been easy for most whites, with their percieved sense of superiority, to simply write the slaves off as inferior blacks, not worth saving, or perhaps they were meant to be slaves. Most Whites may not have known about the horrible conditions on the slave ships, but almost all of them believed that their race was superior. Under these conditions making the slave trade illegal would be almost impossible, Resistance from the Legislature was bad enough, but even without it, most people did not know or did not care about the slave trade. The slave trade was only stopped when people knew about it, people cared about it, and when there was an economicaly viable alternative to slavery. This is why it took so long for the slave trade to end, it required a society in which knowledge could be spread, and it required the first industrial revolution.