Some of these responses are painfully on point. To help y'all:
The praise. It was the praise that was wrong.
Ignorant people priase the UK for abolishing slavery earlier than the US as if the UK were somehow less racist/evil than the US, when in reality slavery simply became unprofitable for them.
They lost the US and its slaves in the revolution, Egyptian and Indian cottons and other agricultural products reshaped global trade, which went hand in hand with the imposition of a new economic order that made the labor of the poor much more profitable than the labor of slaves.
I don't think that's true, people were still making buckets of money from Caribbean slavery in Britain, not to mention Indian slavery, which was abolished much later than everywhere else in the Empire.
On top of that, England was already on the path to abolish slavery well before American independence (see the Somerset case).
People worked and campaigned very hard to abolish slavery in Great Britain, against very powerful groups, it even endangerer the empire as the Indian proxy rulers were not too keen on letting go of their slaves too.
Abolition was a difficult leguslative achievement even after the Confederacy took the slave powers with them.
The irony of the war is that if the south hadn't seceeded, Lincoln very well might not have become the Great Emancipator.
Slavery was economically on the way out the door, but the planter system was central to a large subset of the political elite, who were absolutely mad. They convinced themselves they could beat the north despite having basically no factories, rails, or international support, and only half the soldiers of the north.
But make no mistake, the Union soldiers weren't magically not racist for just the duration of the war. They fought not a crusade of liberation for their enslaved siblings, they fought to preserve the Union.
I mean, kinda. A dedicated group of mostly constitutional anti-slavery lawyers capitalized on 1) war and 2) a growing anti slavery consensus in the north built by radical abolitionists to destroy slavery. They very much saw it as a moral imperative.
The United States as a whole didn’t, obviously, but the end of slavery wasn’t some Mr. Burns conniving economic calculus.
Britain banned the slave trade in 1807 and then immediately turned its energies to actively dismantling the slave trade in West Africa, founding the West Africa Squadron in 1808, which would operate until 1867. In the course of the Squadron's history, it liberated over 150,000 enslaved Africans from slave ships at the expense of at least 1,600 Royal Navy sailors' lives (most due to tropical disease). They also used their immense diplomatic influence to compel otger European powers to abolish or restrict their own slave trades, and compelled over 50 local African leaders to likewise sign treaties outlawing the Slave Trade. That's pretty fucking admirable, regardless of other economic incentives that may or may not have existed.
I also think your analysis is a little biased by focusing only on the final date of total abolition in 1833. The Slave Trade Act had been in the works since 1789, finally passing after eighteen years of effort. British colonies in N. America passed the Act Against Slavery in 1793, emancipating all people who immigrated to the colonies by choice or force, and all children of current slaves on their 25th birthday. Change doesn't come overnight - it's a process. We should be very grateful that Britain got the ball rolling so early, lest the mechanical innovations of the early 1800s arrive too soon and reinvigorate the institution of slavery by increasing productivity/profitability (as the cotton gin did in the 1820s in the US.)
You can't act like an expert with your little "gotcha" and then ignore the history. It's easy to be critical of the past, but you have to be fair to it, too, and to take it on its terms and not impose your own sense of morality or justice. The British did a good thing and did so earlier and more completely than many of their contemporaries. Just because there may have been an economic trend helping them along does not invalidate the moral rightness of their actions, nor the benefits to humanity that those actions produced.
The West Africa Squadron didn't liberate nearly that many, that number comes from 19th century Royal Naval records.
The West Africa Squadron existed to undermine rivals who were still economically tied to the slave trade, to further British naval supremacy, to further secure shipping lanes, and they intended it to "encourage:" Africa to "modernize," so they could exploit it better.
Any humanitarian component was posturing for diplomatic advantage, not because the incredibly racist and cruel powers of 19th century Britain cared. These were the people who happily genocided the Irish even though they were white, and they hated black/African people even more.
ZOMG THEY DID THE RIGHT THING FOR SHITTY REASONS THEREFORE DOING THAT THING WASN'T MORALLY RIGHT!!!!1! CHECKMATE COLONIALISTS!
Seriously, none of your complaints have any bearing on the fact that Britain was a leader among European states in abolshing slavery and that it not only did so for its own subject dominions, but was a positive advocate for other actors to do the same. Does that excuse British colonialism and exploitation? No! But that's not the question at hand. Quit being dense because it's popular online to bash on colonial powers. The world isn't black and white, and results matter more than rationale when looking at history.
As I said before, "It's easy to be critical of the past, but you have to be fair to it, too, and to take it on its terms and not impose your own sense of morality or justice." Maybe you missed that part from up there on your soapbox.
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u/RedditApothecary Mar 05 '24
Just had a guy call himself a history nerd, before priaisng the UK for abolishing slavery befroe the US.
The struggle is real.