Condemned for engaging in the illicit traffic: Mapping the maritime blockade of the African slave trade from a global perspective, 1800–1902

This article maps the maritime blockade of the African slave trade between 1800 and 1902 using over 3400 documented capture locations across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds and made available on LiberatedAfricans.org . Drawing on naval logs and trial proceedings, it treats documented captures as spatial evidence of shifting legal authority at sea. Suppression developed through national laws, bilateral treaties and judicial practice, moving from wartime prize law to peacetime treaties and from flag-based jurisdiction to evidentiary standards shaped by geography and the equipment clause. Mapping reveals a blockade that was global in ambition but uneven in execution, with Britain accounting for roughly three-quarters of documented seizures while other naval interventions reflected a multinational effort. The article reframes abolition at sea as a shifting spatial regime produced through anti-slave trade law that curtailed transoceanic chattel slave trading while expanding state-managed coercion through ‘liberation’ and government run indentureship programmes.