YOUR ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO JANE AUSTEN’S ENGLAND ANTI-SLAVERY ACTION
In October 1562, English merchant John Hawkins set sail from Plymouth for the West African coast. Having heard of the great profits to be made from capturing people there and selling them in the Caribbean, he filled his ships with enslaved Africans – and became the first known Briton to profit from the transatlantic slave trade. Over the following three centuries, some 12 million Africans were forcibly transported.
During Jane Austen’s lifetime, abolition and slavery became an incredibly important moral, political and social issue, intertwined withof a marriage settlement that included a responsibility for dispersing the property of a plantation and its profits.
