1807 25 March
Slave Trade Abolition Bill passed in the British Parliament

1808
British West Africa Squadron (Royal Navy) established to suppress slave trading.

1815
End of Napoleonic Wars. At the Congress of Vienna, Britain puts pressure on France, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain to abolish slave trade.

1819 11 March
Henry Tate born in Chorley Lancashire. The eleventh child of the Revd William and Agnes Tate.

1838 1 August
Enslaved men, women and children in British Empire finally became free after a period of forced apprenticeship following the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833

1839
Henry Tate now owned six grocery shops - four in Liverpool, one in Birkenhead and one in Ormskirk

1842
Britain and US signed Webster-Ashburton Treaty, banning slave trade on high seas.

1848
Emancipation by the French of their slaves

1859
Henry Tate went into partnership with John Wright, a cane sugar refiner of Manesty Lane, Liverpool.

1861
Henry Tate sells his six grocery shops to finance the refinery with Wright the following year

1865
Slavery finally abolished in United States territories

1869
Wright withdraws from the refinery with Tate and the company became Henry Tate & Sons.

1870
Tate built a new refinery in Love Lane, Liverpool. Here he incorporated the so-called 'Greenock method' of refining (Greenock then being one of the centres of refining), which included boiling the sugar in a partial vacuum, and at a low temperature, to reduce caramelizing

1872
Tate introduced another new method, developed in France by Bovin and Loiseau, using lime and carbonic acid to purify the sugar. Tate bought the rights to this, and introduced it to Love Lane.

1875
Tate learned of a process for making sugar into small cubes, patented by Eugen Langen of Cologne. Hitherto sugar had been sold in blocks or 'loaves', which needed to be broken or chopped into smaller usable pieces. Tate, jointly with another refiner in Liverpool, David Martineau, bought the rights to the Langen cube-making process.

1878
Tate bought a derelict shipyard on the Thames at Silvertown. It was to be the site of his largest refinery, which operated under the control of his son, Edwin.

1888
Slavery abolished in Brazil

1892
Tate bought, for £12,000, the exclusive British rights to the cube-making process, which had been patented by Gustav Adant of Brussels. Tate's refinery began to use this process in 1894. The family firm became a private limited company two years later, when Henry retired and his eldest son, William Henry, was made its first chairman.