The Slave Trade, and Lord Palmerston's Bill by the Viscount de Sá da Bandeira. Ex-Secretary if State for Foreign Affairs.
[N.p. (London)]: [S.n.], 1840. First edition. Later gilt green leather binding. [4] 68 [2] p. Bookplate on the front free flyleaf. Binding slightly rubbed at the extremities. First title page stained, with damage to the lower outer corner of both title pages. Pages tanned, with foxing to the first and last leaves. Otherwise a very good copy.
Scarce Portuguese defence of abolitionist policy and sovereignty, documenting a rare dispute between two leading abolitionists during Britain’s global campaign against the slave trade.
A political pamphlet by the Viscount de Sá da Bandeira, written in response to Lord Palmerston’s bill authorizing British cruisers to seize Portuguese vessels suspected of involvement in the slave trade and to subject them to British jurisdiction. The work constitutes a polemic between two abolitionists, centered on law, diplomacy, and method. Published in the same year as the original Portuguese version.
Bernardo de Sá Nogueira de Figueiredo, 1st Marquis of Sá da Bandeira (1795–1876) was a Portuguese nobleman and politician who served repeatedly as Prime Minister during the constitutional era. A leading figure in liberal politics, he was closely associated with Portuguese anti–slave-trade legislation and negotiations with Britain.
Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) was British Foreign Secretary at the time addressed in this pamphlet and later Prime Minister. He played a central role in British foreign policy and in Britain’s international campaign against the slave trade.
Sá da Bandeira sets out Portugal’s measures against the slave trade, focusing on the December 1836 decree abolishing the trade throughout Portuguese dominions and on regulations intended to prevent misuse of the Portuguese flag. He reviews actions taken against implicated officials and traders within the framework of Portugal’s treaty obligations, and reconstructs the Anglo-Portuguese negotiations of 1836–1838 from diplomatic correspondence. He argues that a suppression treaty providing for regulated rights of search and mixed commissions had been agreed in substance, attributes its failure to later British demands, and contests Lord Palmerston’s claims assigning primary responsibility to the Portuguese flag. He further examines the limits of naval enforcement, arguing that repression at sea cannot end the trade while slavery persists in the importing regions of the Americas, and treating abolition of slavery itself as the decisive condition for suppression.
Published just after Britain completed emancipation in its own colonies in 1838, the pamphlet captures an internal abolitionist dispute over authority and method. It preserves a first-hand Portuguese account of a major Anglo-Portuguese controversy and offers a contemporary view of how suppression treaties were negotiated, challenged, and defended, and how anti-slavery policy intersected with sovereignty and treaty law in late-1830s Atlantic politics.
Scarce on the market; RBH records only two sales of the book.
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Price: €4,000.00