Hopkins, Daniel P. ‘The Danish Ban on the Atlantic Slave Trade and Denmark’s African Colonial Ambitions, 1787–1807’. Itinerario, vol. 25, no. 3–4, Cambridge University Press, Nov. 2001, pp. 154–184.
On 16 March 1792, King Christian VII of Denmark, his own incompetent hand guided by that of the young Crown Prince Frederik (VI), signed decree banning both the importation of slaves into the Danish West Indies (now the United States Virgin Islands) and their export from the Danish establishments on the Guinea Coast, in what is now Ghana. To soften the blow to the planters of the Danish West Indies and to secure the continued production of sugar, the law was not to take effect for ten years. In the meantime, imports of slaves, and of women especially, would actually encouraged by state loans and favourable tariffs, so as, it was hoped, render the slave population capable of reproducing itself naturally thereafter.