Following years of increasing demands for abolition, and several attempts to restrict the transatlantic slave trade, abolitionists in the House of Commons managed to pass a bill in 1799 that aimed to limit the trade in enslaved people. The bill intended to restrict the actions of enslavers further, limiting their activities to a certain number of ports in Africa and setting quotas for the number of captive people permitted to be transported aboard their ships. It was hoped that the passage of such an act would end the worst excesses of the trade, reduce the high mortality rates experienced by enslaved Africans during their passage to the Americas and gradually make the trade in enslaved people unprofitable. 

When the bill came to the House of Lords, it faced great opposition from lobbyists with interests in the slave trade, and a series of debates were held on the matter. This book contains the speech against the bill made by the Duke of Clarence (later William IV) that opened the debate. The Duke had been approached by the Committee of West India Merchants and Planters and the Mercantile Interest of Liverpool who strongly opposed abolition on commercial grounds. Published by the two groups ‘as the best means of combating… the erroneous and dangerous doctrines of their adversaries’ the speech uses many of the arguments employed by opponents of abolition and relied heavily on longstanding racial prejudices. The bill was eventually rejected by the Lords by a margin of seven votes.

However, calls for abolition continued to gain strength and in 1807 the slave trade was abolished. In 1834, by which time William had become king, further laws were passed that abolished slavery throughout the British Empire, effective from 1838. In order to push the latter bill through Parliament, £20 million was borrowed by the British government to compensate those who had benefitted from the trade. The final repayment for this loan was made only in 2015. The decision to provide compensation to those who had profited from the enslavement of others and not to those freed by abolition remains controversial.