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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.
It's interesting that the indenture system continued in some areas in the US long after the civil war, and in areas which had long been anti slavery. The difference to them was it was 'voluntary', and the usually farm workers were indentured to learn the trade and compensate the farmer by labor. It was often done by parents with children who could later use what they learned. As minors, the parents gave the permission. The children couldn't cancel, which makes it involuntary, but the semantics were different.
In industrial areas, it was easier and more productive to hire the portion of the poor/immigrant population only those who filled your needs, pay them as little as you had to, and if they died or were injured or were trouble, find someone who wasn't. The clothing mills hired by size, including children who often were injured and sometimes died, but were cheap to replace. If portions of their supplies came from bonded labor it wasn't a problem, so that wasn't an objection. It was just it did not fill their need.
One of my professers in college had a couple of fingers missing on one hand. As a small child, in the 20's he worked in a mill in Pennsulvania. They washed the crushed ore down a flat shoot, and the children picked out the bits of rock. When he was five, it was expected children would work at the mill. It was a shock to most of the class that in that time and place it was still 'normal' for children have missing fingers or lost hands.
Today, factory mills just move to places where the risky situation and low pay are acceptable because people have few other choices.
Yes, cotton, but not just any cotton. When the southern US broke away, they were a primary supplier of British factories. But there are different grades of cotten, and the one that mattered was the one which could be processed in a mechanized factory. The lesser types which were used for less durable items paid off but not so well.
So their interest was in the high quality and tough fibers of the premium crop. That they were willing to pay so well was why the southern farms were willing to invest so much in a crop. So long as this situation continued, the South was willing to invest in a primary crop, and the British were willing to stay out of the way in the potential war that was fueling.
But the British had expanded into India, and at the time the South was holding onto that dependency, the first fields of Indian Cotton were growing. It was denser and stronger and bigger than southern cotton. Best of all from the British point of view, it was also grown on their own land. The labor was cheaper, and quite plentiful. Even if the war had not come, the end of the good days for the south and cotton were already starting to be over.
Even today, the best quality cotton still comes from India.
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Originally Posted by Dd714
Yup, people are giving to much credit to the British, people been listening once again to that peculiar historical affliction I commonly call BSS (british superiority syndrome) when reflecting on the British Empire of old. It should be noted that the US was the first to ban the international slave trade - during the Revolutionary Wars. Naturally that was an economic warfare element against the largest slave trader in the world - The British Empire.
The British were one of the first countries to ban slavery and the Royal Navy even policied the seas stopping slave ships from other nations.
After the war the slave trade was put in back into effect for a defined final period of two decades and then abolished by the US the same month as the British - 1808 (signed into law in 1807).
It should also be noted that most of the northeastern US states outlawed slavery before the British Empire got into the act
The South of the US had slavery and apartheid for a long time, there was even racial segragation as recently as the 1960's. So the US is no shining light when it comes to slavery and the treatment of the black population.
Oh and India - yup, slavery continued in British owned (actually British East Indian Company owned) colonial India. The anti-slavery decree was simply ignored. Jolly good times in India ole chaps!
The Indian Caste System was far worse than any slavery, it meant you were assigned your status at birth even if that status was a begger, and India might have been part of the Empire which was largely based on Trade but it was by and large run by the the Indian Maharajas who continued to maintain order within their states, tax their subjects, allocate revenue, and patronize cultural activities in a way that fused traditional royal duty with Western models of governance. The Maharajas were made very wealthy by the new trade provided by the Empire and the exports of tea and other goods.
The British were one of the first countries to ban slavery and the Royal Navy even policied the seas stopping slave ships from other nations.
Yes...everything in your post was discussed previously in this thread. My post was a response to it. The fact remains that some US states banned slavery, and the slave trade, before Britian.
No one argues that racial segregation did not continue to exist in the US after the end of slavery.
Indian caste system indeed, that's slowly dying out in urban India but still exists in rural India (I used to travel there quite a bit). The surprising thing is how many Indian in the lower caste are accepting of it (a cultural/religious concept). For that matter so does child slaves in some remote parts of India. Also the practice of indentured servants - existed until the middle of the 20th century. "Slavery" exists in many forms.
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.
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Originally Posted by Old Gringo
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.
I think some of the other posters forgot or did not realize that almost all the Northern US states had abolished slavery before the British finally did in the 1830s. Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and the future Vermont actually began the process when they were still colonies fighting for independence against the British.
Breaking away from the British Empire actually sped up the abolition movement in the Northern United States.
But what Dd714 is saying about economics is right. If the Southern states (colonies) had remained within the British Empire, the British probably would have taken even longer to abolish slavery then they did in real life (1834).
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Yes...everything in your post was discussed previously in this thread. My post was a response to it. The fact remains that some US states banned slavery, and the slave trade, before Britian. No one argues that racial segregation did not continue to exist in the US after the end of slavery.
It's a pointless argument though, as slavery was banned in Britain, and was banned throughout the Empire later. Furthermore the fact that a few states banned it does to negate the fact it was still going on in the US. However I do recognise and admire the fact that certain states did ban slavery at an early stage.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dd714
Indian caste system indeed, that's slowly dying out in urban India but still exists in rural India (I used to travel there quite a bit). The surprising thing is how many Indian in the lower caste are accepting of it (a cultural/religious concept). For that matter so does child slaves in some remote parts of India. Also the practice of indentured servants - existed until the middle of the 20th century. "Slavery" exists in many forms.
The Caste System was awful, as for slavery it still sadly exists in some corners of the world to this day.
The simply answer is yes but I think its more complicated than that.
Assuming the South would have STILL generated substantial wealth from slavery ie. cotton, the core facts that motivated the South's staunch position on slavery would have likely had a lot of support in England because many of the English elite would have been profiting from Cotton as well. Its safe to assume that many of not most of the Southern plantation would have been owned by English elite who could have had enough political clout to keep slavery alive in the Colonies, especially the South long after it was abolished else where.
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Originally Posted by LINative
Best answers on this thread.
I think some of the other posters forgot or did not realize that almost all the Northern US states had abolished slavery before the British finally did in the 1830s. Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and the future Vermont actually began the process when they were still colonies fighting for independence against the British.
Breaking away from the British Empire actually sped up the abolition movement in the Northern United States.
But what Dd714 is saying about economics is right. If the Southern states (colonies) had remained within the British Empire, the British probably would have taken even longer to abolish slavery then they did in real life (1834).
So the answer to the op is NO.
While it's true that Britain profited immensely from the cotton/slave trade, there is a major factor these posts miss: France would never have sold the western lands (which were the prime cotton boom lands) to Britain. France sold those lands to the United States partly to finance its wars against Britain. Without Louisiana, Arkansas, and full control of the Mississippi river valley, there simply would not have been adequate room to expand slavery as dramatically as the United States did during the first half of the 19th century.
It's hard to say, as there would have been so many variables. Cotton only took off in the U.S. after independence, particularly after 1800, and between 1803 and 1937 Prior to the Civil War, cotton was the U.S. main export, and Britain was the main trading partner of the U.S. for the bulk of this period (around 50% of U.S. trade was with Britain in the 1850s). Textiles during the 19th century were 40% of Britain's exports, with cotton textiles particularly being of major importance.
Britain's colonial empire in the West Indies and to lesser extent in the Mascarenes was reliant on slavery for the production of sugarcane. With the introduction of the sugar beet in Europe, sugar prices declined, weakening the Sugar Planters role in parliament making the eventual emancipation more palatable. In addition, the Reform Act in 1832 increased the size of the electorate in the Commons and gave more weight to urban areas, where abolitionism was widely supported.
If the 13 colonies had remained part of the British Empire, the effects on world history would have been immense. Would they have remained separate colonies with a limited or large degree of self-government? If they are separate, one could see Georgia and South Carolina in particular rebelling against the crown. Do acts of the British Parliament automatically become law in the colonies? If there is some sort of push to outlaw slavery throughout the empire, are the northern colonies/provinces responsible for quelling a rebellion, or do they even have the constitutional authority to do so?
Keep in mind, if there is no rebellion in America, or it is suppressed, the subsequent years can change dramatically. For instance, if France does not support the rebels with over 1 billion livres, the French Revolution might not occur as France is able to remain solvent, meaning no Napoleon and no decline of sugarcane. This alone might keep slavery in the West Indian colonies going for a while longer.
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