This article explores the causes and timing of the abolition of the Danish slave trade in 1792. While the existing historiography highlights economic and humanitarian considerations behind the decision to decree abolition of the slave trade and situates such concerns within a Danish context, this article looks at ways in which trans-imperial influences on the Danish government and commercial ties between the Danish colonial empire and other slave trading polities were equally important factors in the move towards abolition.On 16 March 1792, Christian VII of Denmark-Norway decreed the abolition of the Danish slave trade. In a brief announcement, the King declared that 'From the beginning of the year 1803 we wish that the slave trading of our subjects cease on the African coast and wherever else it may take place off our West Indian possessions.' 1 With this resolution, Denmark became the first European colonial empire to officially commit to the abolition of its trans-Atlantic and inter-Caribbean slave trades. Revolutionary France abolished slavery on 4 February 1794, but Napoleon notoriously reinstated both slavery and the slave trade eight years later. 2 In Britain, abolitionists had agitated for the abolition of the slave trade since the early 1780s, but Parliament only decreed the abolition of the British slave trade on 25 March 1807, with effect from 1 January 1808. 3 Other European powers followed more hesitantly, beginning with a pledge to cooperate against the slave trade during the Congress of Vienna. 4 The focus of this article is to revisit the question of why Denmark, a relatively obscure colonial empire on the periphery of Europe, became the first European empire to abolish its slave trade. Unlike Britain, Denmark had seen no parliamentary debates on the slave trade (it was an absolute Monarchy), nor had there been a storm of petitions requesting abolition. Unlike France, Denmark had also not had a group of

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Colonial and postcolonial port cities in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean regions functioned as crucial hubs in the commodity flows that accompanied the emergence and expansion of global capitalism. They did so by bringing together laboring populations of many different backgrounds and statuses – legally free or semi-free wage laborers, soldiers, sailors, and the self-employed, indentured servants, convicts, and slaves. Focusing on the period from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, a crucial moment in the establishment of the world market, the transformation of colonial states, and the reorganization of labor and labor migration on a transoceanic scale, the contributions in this special issue address the consequences of the presence of these “motley crews” on and around the docks and the neighborhoods that stretched behind them. The introduction places the articles within the context of the development of the field of Global Labor History more generally. It argues that the dense daily interaction that took place in port cities makes them an ideal vantage point from which to investigate the consequences of the “simultaneity” of different labor relations for questions such as the organization of the work process under developing capitalism, the emergence of new forms of social control, the impact of forced and free migration on class formation, and the role of social diversity in shaping different forms of group and class solidarity. The introduction also discusses the significance of the articles presented in this special issue for three prevailing but problematic dichotomies in labor historiography: the sharp borders drawn between so-called free and unfree labor, between the Atlantic and the Indian oceans, and the pre-modern and modern eras.

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