‘A slave trade jurisdiction'

In 1870, a British diplomat described the campaign led by the British against the slave trade in the Persian Gulf as follows:

I gather that the English and the better class of Indian merchants, our own fellow subjects, hold distinctly that the Slave Trade and legitimate commerce cannot hope to prosper side by side, that, either, the action of the slave dealers will succeed in killing all proper mercantile instincts and effort, or, that legitimate commerce will develop in proportion as arrangements to put a stop to the slave trade are energetically carried out. ¹

The ‘crusade’ against the slave trade was of considerable importance not only to the history of British imperialism in the Gulf, but also to the framing of British imperialism in the nineteenth century. ² Despite this, the Gulf has been neglected both by historians of the abolitionist process ³ and also by those writing on the historiography of the British Empire. ⁴ However, a careful study of the abolitionist ‘moment’ in the Gulf suggests that the space of the Gulf can be conceptualized as a laboratory for the later British action against slavery, one which sat at the intersection between the international, macro- and micro- regional levels. This moment demonstrates the role and the action of Britain as an emerging global power whose intervention went beyond Gulf frontiers to encompass other zones, including Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Ottoman Empire. ⁵ By intervening in the Gulf, Britain reinforced her status and role in the region later known as the Middle East. The imperial discourse against the slave trade and the measures taken in the Gulf and in neighbouring zones illustrate the emergence of Britain as a world power and the development of a messianic interventionism in the early nineteenth century. ⁶ Policies against slave trading, forged in part in the Gulf, came to underpin the ‘global’ humanitarianism that emerged in Britain in the nineteenth century. ⁷ Imperialism, abolitionism and the birth of a maritime law met in the Gulf.