Gabriel Leon-Ablan

Abstract:  The abolition of slavery in the British empire is usually attributed to the actions of the abolitionist movement. The part played by enslaved people is often ignored. This article shows that slave revolts in the Caribbean helped secure parliamentary support for abolition. Members of parliament were more likely to back a plan that emancipated enslaved people and compensated slave owners when they had more constituents who owned slaves in colonies with revolts. The cross-constituency variation in this exposure to slave revolts was plausibly exogenous and the main results are robust to using several identification strategies. Using data from colonial archives, I show that the mechanism behind this finding is economic: slave revolts reduced the financial value of slaves in the affected colonies, inducing slave owners to support the abolition plan. The article's main conclusion is that enslaved people in the Caribbean were active agents in their own emancipation.