Throughout almost the entire period of the British slave trade, Britain was involved in conflicts with other European powers. During the eighteenth century, from the War of the Spanish Succession in 1702 up to the Napoleonic Wars at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Britain's navy played a critical part in defending its interests abroad. At Trafalgar, the decisive battle that confirmed British naval supremacy in 1805, the very homeland was threatened with French invasion.

In the medieval era, the navy was in its infancy and was yet to be considered the world force it was to become. During this period there was a shortage of specialized custom-built warships, and so it was not unusual for merchant ships to be pressed into service to carry soldiers, rather than experienced sailors, into battle. These soldier/ sailors would engage the enemy at sea using primitive firearms, sidearms and pikes in virtually the same way they would conduct a land battle. When cannon came into use, ships became specialized, but even in Henry VIII's reign cannons were not standardized, as exemplified by the variety of guns reclaimed from the Mary Rose. From then the pattern was set for naval battles until Trafalgar, with wooden sailing ships attempting to disable the enemy until they were close enough to ram or board.

BRITON HAMMON

If the navy has been called ‘Britain's wooden walls’, then sailors of African descent were becoming part of the woodwork by the eighteenth century. Increasingly, black sailors were being recruited from the greater African Diaspora in the Caribbean and America, as well as directly from the African continent. Until the American War of Independence (1775–83), what is now the United States of America was under British rule. A British American black sailor named Briton Hammon has left a short account of a naval engagement in which he took part during the Seven Years War (1756–63) in an autobiography generally regarded as the first American slave narrative and reminiscent of Olaudah Equiano's later Narrative: