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Britain still had colonies throughout the carribean that had industries dependent upon on slaves.
Infact they had to finanically compensate slave owners massively for their financial losses.
Not really - they had Jamaica. Well yeah they had the spit of lands known as the Bahamas and the British West Indies but those were minor rounding numbers to the British budget compared to Jamaica, which in turn was inconsequential compared to the American South. A simple view of a map will reveal that.
And there were other problems - the carribean bread and butter was Sugar. Sugar production was on the decline in the early 19th century. Too much competion by the Dutch, the French, Danish, etc...the people of Europe started getting used to locally grown sugar beets during the Napoleonic wars. That and, even with slaves, it was expensive to produce. It was no longer the money maker it was in the 18th century.
Combine that with the constant threat of slave rebellions which added a military cost to keep order - only 10% of the population of Jamaica was white.
Either way, UK did just fine without slavery. They simply replaced slaves with "indentured servants" in the remaining colonies. Basically the same thing.
The British government paid out £20m to compensate some 3,000 families that owned slaves for the loss of their "property" when slave-ownership was abolished in Britain's colonies in 1833. This figure represented a staggering 40 per cent of the Treasury's annual spending budget and, in today's terms, calculated as wage values, equates to around £16.5bn
Not really - they had Jamaica. Well yeah they had the spit of lands known as the Bahamas and the British West Indies but those were minor rounding numbers to the British budget compared to Jamaica, which in turn was inconsequential compared to the American South. A simple view of a map will reveal that.
Any particular reasons Britain wouldn't just level a slavery compensation tax on the American South, or all of the Americas?
You know... we could go on in this vein for 8 more pages and it still wouldn't change the fact that America did not remain a colony for 30 or 40 more years... I will never understand the white preoccupation with playing revisionist history games with substantive epochs in the human or national timeline.
Would slavery had ended earlier in the US mainland if the 13 colonies remained under the British?
Nope.
The Brits brought slavery to the colonies and their empire depended on exploiting the resources to the maximum extent possible. Slavery was an integral part of that. Matter of fact, their textile industry was so dependent on cheap cotton from the American south that they even considered supporting the Confederacy during the Civil War.
The Brits brought slavery to the colonies and their empire depended on exploiting the resources to the maximum extent possible. Slavery was an integral part of that.
Or, they just convert the slaves into "indentured contract workers" (on life long contracts) and thus not only "free" the slaves, but also keep their access to cheap cotton.
Any particular reasons Britain wouldn't just level a slavery compensation tax on the American South, or all of the Americas?
For what reason? Taxation of the colonies by the British Empire is essentially what caused the American Revolution. That's what's so tough about these "what if" questions. Besides the abolitionist movements, which existed in both the old and new world, slavery wasn't an issue for the British until they lost the colonies on the mainland. Slavery wasn't an issue for the newly independent colonies until they developed an decentralized state government system of free states and slave states. That's why I submit that slavery indeed could have lasted longer under British rule.
Interesting question. Who's to say those in the American colonies who had a vested interest in keeping & expanding slavery as the country grew wouldn't have revolted against the crown to preserve it?
The British first declared the slave trade illegal in 1807. It took them 26 years to abolish it, including a massive taxpayer-funded buyout of a long chain of both slave owners and businessmen involved in or affected by the slave trade. Former slaves themselves received no reparations for their past labor; rather they were impressed into continued, low paid service to their former masters as 'apprentices' for years until that practice was outlawed.
Britain freed about 800,000 slaves, while the American colonies had over 2 million around that time frame. Unlike the American colonies few if any slaves actually lived in England proper, therefore the issue of assimilation was far less pressing.
No WAY!
How many cotton plantation are in the UK? Slavery was abolished by UK because, by losing it's US colonies, it lost it's agricultural industries and thus the foundation for slavery.
The abolisionist movement is correlated to those areas where there is no financial incentive to the use of slave labor - the northeast of the US, Canada, and UK. The economy of the southern US in contrast was based on agriculture. Abolishing slavery was easy and painless for the UK in the 1830s, they had Jamaica which was already racked with revolts. But for the UK to create a law and then impose that on it's colonies: 1.) The financial penalty would be to great, 2.)It would require a war as it did with the US civil war.
Perhaps the institution of slavery would last longer, as it did in Brazil.
A significant majority of US slaveholders were protestant. That aside, abolition or slavery had little to do with any specific religious group whether they were Christian, Moslem, Hindu, Buddhist, Amnistic etc. Rather, it was mostly a question of economics, slave availability mixed with large scale agriculture. Though abolitionists were sincere, it should also be noted that they frequently resided in areas that were not conducive to large scale slavery and thus there was no personal economic dependence on "The Peculiar Institution".
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Would slavery had ended earlier in the US mainland if the 13 colonies remained under the British?
