ABSTRACT
Historians of both the British Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave systems have frequently accounted for differences in their processes of abolition with reference to different mechanisms of enslavement, different deployments of slaves, demographic profiles, economic systems, or cultural variations in religious or racial foundations for those systems. When the abolitionist movement emerged in Britain toward the end of the 1780s the British population in India consisted of relatively small contingents of military and administrative personnel, amounting to no more than one in a thousand indigenous inhabitants. For British abolitionists India remained peripheral to their main concern with Africa and Africans until the 1830s, first with regard to the African slave trade and later to colonial slavery. The Anti-Slavery Society also held back from full support of a campaign intertwining economic and humanitarian arguments. The argument that Indian free labor was cheaper than transatlantic slave labor was quickly dismissed by the spokesman for the British government.
