Editing Atlantic slave trade (section)

===British abolitionism===
{{Main|Abolitionism in the United Kingdom}}
{{See also|Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade}}
[[Quakers]] began to campaign against the [[British Empire]]'s slave trade in the 1780s, and from 1789 [[William Wilberforce]] was a driving force in the British Parliament in the fight against the trade. The abolitionists argued that the trade was not necessary for the economic success of sugar in the British West Indian colonies. This argument was accepted by wavering politicians, who did not want to destroy the valuable and important sugar colonies of the British Caribbean. Parliament was also concerned about the success of the [[Haitian Revolution]], and they believed they had to abolish the trade to prevent a similar conflagration from occurring in a British Caribbean colony.<ref>Christer Petley, ''White Fury: A Jamaican Slaveholder and the Age of Revolution'' (Oxford: [[Oxford University Press]], 2018), pp. 200–209.</ref>

On 22 February 1807, the House of Commons passed a motion by 283 votes to 16 to abolish the Atlantic slave trade. Hence, the slave trade was abolished, but not the still-economically viable institution of slavery itself, which provided Britain's most lucrative import at the time, sugar. Abolitionists did not move against sugar and slavery itself until after the sugar industry went into terminal decline after 1823.{{sfn|Williams|2021|pp=105–106, 120–122}}

The United States passed its own [[Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves]] the next week (March 2, 1807), although probably without mutual consultation. The act only took effect on the first day of 1808; since a compromise clause in the [[Article One of the United States Constitution#Clause 1: Slave trade|US Constitution (Article 1, Section 9, Clause 1)]] prohibited federal, although not state, restrictions on the slave trade before 1808. The United States did not, however, abolish its [[Slavery in the United States#Internal slave trade|internal slave trade]], which became the dominant mode of US slave trading until the 1860s.<ref>{{cite book |first=Marcyliena H. |last=Morgan |year=2002 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=mhJcsiydNe8C&pg=PA20 |title=Language, Discourse and Power in African American Culture |publisher=[[Cambridge University Press]] |page=20 |isbn=978-0-521-00149-6}}</ref> In 1805 the British Order-in-Council had restricted the importation of slaves into colonies that had been captured from France and the Netherlands.{{sfn|Lovejoy|2000|p=290}} Britain continued to press other nations to end its trade; in 1810 an Anglo-Portuguese treaty was signed whereby Portugal agreed to restrict its trade into its colonies; an [[Treaty of Stockholm (1813)|1813 Anglo-Swedish treaty]] whereby Sweden outlawed its [[Swedish slave trade|slave trade]]; the [[Treaty of Paris (1814)|Treaty of Paris 1814]] where France agreed with Britain that the trade is "repugnant to the principles of natural justice" and agreed to abolish the slave trade in five years; the [[Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814|1814 Anglo-Dutch treaty]] where the Dutch outlawed its slave trade.{{sfn|Lovejoy|2000|p=290}}