“[S]old to Any One Who Would Buy Them”

Abstract

Abstract The British Parliament passed the Slave Trade Abolition Act in 1807, making the transatlantic trade in human beings illegal. Intended to eliminate Atlantic high-sea slave trading, the 1807 Act placed limitations on how the merchant and planter class could move their human property between British holdings while also forbidding intercolonial slave trading. Included was an imperial-sanctioned exception to the rule—the “convict slave” clause—that allowed authorities in the British Caribbean to sell enslaved people to foreign colonies under transportation sentences allocated by colonial courts. This article pays particular attention to criminal transportation and its use to punish the enslaved. Execution of such sentences occurred at a time when Britain began its maritime abolition campaign and Spanish participation in the transatlantic slave trade simultaneously intensified. It provides evidence of operations of a local market in convicted enslaved people in Jamaica that was only possible because of the island’s intra-American slave trading connections with the Spanish Americas, and in particular, the commercial connections it held with the nearby-island of Cuba.