Ever since Philip D. Curtin published his work The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), the vexed question regarding how many Africans were taken across the Atlantic to be enslaved in the New World has been the subject of often contentious debate for decades. What has not been contested is the fact that the Atlantic slave trade was a very large-scale enterprise that produced immense profits for the financiers of the trade in Britain and elsewhere. The transatlantic trade system was supported by well-organized and resourceful personnel of sailors, stevedores, shipbuilders, consuls and other well-placed politicians, and business people in Europe and the Americas.

For a long period after the Abolition Act was promulgated by the British House of Commons in 1807, British writers consistently credited the altruistic and humanitarian concerns of Britain for the ending of the nefarious capturing and trading of human beings across the Middle Passage. This school of thought prevailed until the 1940s, when Eric Williams contested the notion of British humanitarianism as the dominant factor accounting for the abolition of the slave trade. In his book Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC, 1964), Williams virtually debunked the thesis of altruism/humanitarianism by cogently directing attention to, and providing evidence regarding the role and place of, economics as the ultimate factor that propelled the British Parliament to finally enact the 1807 law. It was quite clear that the British had not felt a need to empathize with the Africans who were forcibly transported across the Middle Passage to shed their blood, sweat, and tears for the accumulation of wealth for Europeans and their compatriots in the New World colonies prior to the nineteenth century. Indeed, the British Parliament had been presented with unimpeachable evidence as late as the 1790s, when the Jamaican Assembly moved to abolish the slave trade to the island and the institution of slavery in the plantations thereon. Rather than abolition, the British House of Commons opted for a reform of the system. This was a calculated and carefully considered political action that reflected the immense economic benefits derived from the Atlantic slave trade by the British political economy. Only when British economic interests were served did the House of Commons see it fit to enact the law proscribing the participation of subjects of the British Crown in the nefarious trade in human cargoes. If the pervasiveness of the view that the Abolition Act of 1807 was borne out of British altruistic concerns was tempered by Eric Williams's economics thesis, the recent overcelebration in Britain of the abolition act needed to be contested and put in its proper historical context.

Marika Sherwood's After Abolition is therefore a timely and critical intervention regarding Britain's role in the transatlantic slave trade and slavery. In discussing British complicity in the plantation economy of Brazil, Sherwood notes that “the British government was given plenty of evidence of British complicity in the slave trade by the Royal Navy, … its own consuls and visitors to Brazil … [and] that there is no question but that both the minister and the consul of Great Britain at Rio now know of the participation of British subjects in the slave trade” (104). Sherwood produces evidence to indict the British government and prominent Britons for direct participation in the slave trade and slavery in the Caribbean and South America. While the British are busily engaged in the bicentennial celebrations of the 1807 Abolition Act, Sherwood reminds us that Britain's involvement in the slave trade post-1807, even if not illegal, was “in total contradiction to the much publicized abolitionist politics and propaganda of the British government” (109). Sherwood notes not only that Britain did nothing about the role of its citizens and corporations in the slave trade but that the British political economy benefited from the sale of Africans for enslavement in the plantation economies of Cuba, Brazil, and other parts of the New World. According to Sherwood, “This wealth-creation from slavery was not and still has not been acknowledged” by the British government (109). Thus, she felt it imperative that a work of this nature be published.

Consisting of six chapters, the book analyzes such salient issues as the slave trade and slavery, the contributory role of the nefarious trade in human beings and the contribution of slave labor to the development of the cities of Liverpool and Manchester, and “the tangled webs of commerce and banking in order to discover who profited by how much from slavery and the slave trade” (56). The rest of the work looks at the British imperial interest in the slave-dependent economies of Cuba and Brazil, the exportation of captured peoples from Africa and the increased use of domestic slaves in the continent after 1807, and, finally, the complicit role of the “British people, government and parliament” in the continuation of the slave trade following the promulgation of the Abolition Act. The last chapter captures especially the pivotal role of British merchants and bankers in influencing official policy for and on behalf of their own vested interests. For instance, Sherwood demonstrates the clout of the various merchants groups in such cities as Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow, which were able to secure the revocation in 1869 of “an Act to enable the Anti-Slave Trade Squadron to seize any vessel equipped for the trade in enslaved Africans” (158). Sherwood also notes the ability of the merchant class to undermine existing laws by finding a way round such laws.

Marika Sherwood does not pretend to have written the definitive work on Britain's role in the slave trade and slavery in the years following the promulgation of the Abolition Act of 1807. In fact, she asks more questions than she provides answers for. What Sherwood has done is not only raise issues and ask probing and pointed questions in a quite lucid manner but, more important, pose what amounts to an open challenge to scholars of British history to no longer shy away from investigating the critical issues still not addressed regarding the slave trade. As she observes in the conclusion, Britain seems to have “made more money out of slavery and the slave trade after 1807 than before.” She thus questions, seemingly in frustration if not anger, the evident dearth of “analyses … investigations … [and] books on this” (175).