The Abolition of Slavery

Freedom was declared in 1794 but Napoleon restored slavery. Exam tip: write both achievement and instability.

The end of slavery came gradually through struggle. Exam tip: connect liberty ideal colonial economy and 1848.

The governing concept is the contradiction between universal liberty and the institution of slavery. Liberty means that a person should possess control over personal decisions, labour, movement and life. Under slavery, however, owners claimed legal and economic authority over enslaved people, treated their labour as property and often used coercion to maintain production. Therefore, option A directly shows the clash: revolutionary language spoke of freedom, while plantation society denied it to enslaved workers. Options B, C and D are not suitable because participation in the National Assembly, equal wages and ownership of plantations were generally excluded by the structure of slavery; they describe rights that enslaved people were denied rather than the contradiction itself.

The governing concept is the economic connection between consumer demand and colonial exploitation. European consumers wanted products such as sugar, coffee, tobacco and cotton in increasing quantities. Plantation owners responded by expanding production, and this expansion depended heavily on the forced labour of enslaved Africans. The profits earned from plantation exports encouraged merchants, shippers and owners to continue the slave-trading system. Thus option A is correct: demand did not merely exist separately from slavery; it helped make slave labour commercially profitable. Options B, C and D contradict the historical relationship because demand did not make enslaved people ministers, did not stop the trade, and Europe was deeply connected with colonial economies.