Istwa Nou

Antigua's slave trade peaked in the middle 1750s and again in the late 1760s, with annual arrivals sometimes above 5,000. London merchants dominated in one phase and Liverpool merchants in another, and the island itself sent out a notable number of its own slaving vessels, which was unusual for a colony of that size. The African regions supplying it shifted across the century, away from the Gold Coast and toward the Windward Coast and the Bight of Biafra. After Britain banned the traffic in 1808 arrivals continued at a trickle. They came from shipwrecks and from vessels seized by the Royal Navy, whose captives were landed in the islands and put to work under terms officially called apprenticeship. Abolishing the trade left slavery itself standing for another generation. Britain freed the people it held in 1834, thirty years after Haiti had taken its freedom by force of arms.