Britain, and specifically the Royal Navy, played a large and arguably decisive part in ending the slave trade. Like so many on the left, Starmer, Hermer and Lammy despise Britain and its history. African countries complaining about the slave trade should note that people were enslaved initially by their fellow Africans, marched to the coast, and then sold to slave traders. In many cases, colonization stopped the slave trade, the occupation of the slave port of Lagos being one example. According to Christopher Lloyd's The Navy and the Slave Trade, the Royal Navy lost 2,000 men fighting the slave trade in the nineteenth century. There have been a number of good popular histories of the anti-slave trade campaign recently, but Lloyd's earlier work is based on extensive research in primary sources. For West Africa alone, 1,567 deaths were recorded from 1830-65, the height of the campaign, according to Parliamentary Papers. This excludes deaths at the Cape, in the West Indies, South America, and later in the century on the East African coast (fighting the Muslim slave trade). Noted historian Jeremy Black, writing in The Critic, gives a figure of 17,000, but this seems overstated. It may include all injured, sick or pensioned-off. t.co/hZWF1HfvId Relevant pages from Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade: The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century, Routledge: 1968 (1949), pp 288-89.
