This course explores Belfast’s involvement in the international transatlantic slave trade and its role as a centre of abolitionist agitation. It firstly examines how Belfast’s merchant classes in the mid-18th century were involved in trade with the slave plantations in the West Indies. The course then examines how, by the 1790s, the city became increasingly known as a centre of radical thought fighting against the slave trade and the institution of slavery. The city hosted former slaves like Olaudah Equiano in 1791 and ‘fugitive slaves’ like Frederick Douglass and Samuel Ringgold Ward in the middle of the 19th Century. Once slavery had been abolished in the British Empire in the 1830s, Belfast campaigners turned their energies to campaigning against slavery in the southern States of the USA.
