Two questions that may have some factual answers …
To what extent if any did England encourage slavery and perhaps even resist movements toward ending slavery prior to our independence?
In the 1830’s when England abolished slavery, how did the economics of slavery compare between England’s colonies and the U.S. ?
Slavery was pretty much unknown within the UK; it was just established in their colonies, and was a big profit item for their slave traders. The resistance usually came from the traders and the plantation owners and their friends. Most of the rest of the UK didn’t care about the issue until Wilberforce started making it a political issue.
Slavery was, as you see, illegal in England (or rather not recognised by the law in England) and in most English overseas territory. As I understand it this was due to a lack of statute supporting slavery, so those British territories with slavery statutes on the books (or who introduced them in response to the ruling) such as Virginia and Jamaica kept their slaves, while others followed the English ruling and had no more slaves.
The discovery that sugar could be made from sugar beet grown in Europe, rather than sugar cane grown on West Indian slave plantations and transported across the Atlantic, meant that the economic incentive to slavery began to disappear, just as the moral case against it began to be made more strongly.
Homework assignment? 
On Christmas? :dubious:
Glad I didn’t go to the same school you did. 
England didn’t need slaves, they had the Irish.
Nope… just wondering what kind of moral authority England had when they got us started down the human bondage road and then only abolished it after it was much less lucrative for them.
someone had to start the ball rolling.
Which neatly ignores the fact that the American colonies were British and slavery was not exactly imposed on this colony, more imported with the colonists, they were one and the same people, this is ot starting Amreicans with slavery but really its a continuation of an accepted practice, its just that one part of those peoples got rid of slavery first
I think that’s the point of the original question: from WHERE did the colonists import the institution of slavery. I dont think it was from England.
Slavery never really existed in the British Isles. The Brits had a long history of serfdom, of indentured servants, of dirt-cheap labor from abused children and Irish. But it was the Americans (yes, of British descent) who were started holding public slave auctions to sell humans the same way you sell horses.
Slavery was well known and widespread in the British Isles. When the Domesday book was written 10% of the population were chattel slaves, it was widely practiced amongst the Irish as well. The Norman Conquest lead to the end of chattel slavery in England and I believe it also died out in Ireland around the same time. It was replaced with a system of involuntary servitude known as serfdom/seigneurialism and that was also slavery in every true sense of the word.
By 1500s serfdom had mostly come to an end in the entirety of England/Scotland/Wales, and it was one of the first regions where serfdom truly died out.
This doesn’t, to my mind, have much to do with the question of chattel slavery in British colonies. However I just object to the factual statement that “slavery never existed in the British Isles” when at one point it was common and widespread.
As for where the British colonists “got it”, the answer is basically that it was what made sense when they went over. There was no real moral opposition to the idea of enslaving non-Christian “lesser people” amongst the British in the late 16th/early 17th century. Like the Spanish before them, British colonies from the 13 in North America to colonies in the Caribbean and elsewhere practiced chattel slavery of indigenous (and later African) peoples wherever there was a need for lots of laborers.
From the English Bill of Rights and onward obviously the English felt some concept of personal liberty, but that really did not extend to non-Christians and indigenous peoples in conquered territories. Even when slavery ended in its overseas possessions, the British treated indigenous peoples very roughly throughout the 19th century.
There is nothing surprising about the existence of chattel slaves in any European colony during the 1500s-early 1700s, at least when we’re talking about plantation economy colonies. It’s really not notable at all that chattel slavery was practiced in the American colonies.
What is notable is that it continued so long and actually became more entrenched during the 19th century, an era when everyone else was going in the opposite direction. During the 18th century it wasn’t a totally unknown line of thought that widespread chattel slavery was on the way out, even in the southern colonies/states. It was looking very much like an economically dead end situation. Furthermore, the relationship between slave and master seemed a lot different then. It was a lot more common for slaves to “work themselves free” by buying their freedom in the 18th century in America, it also was a lot more common for slave owners to educate their slaves and many of the slave holders who took place in the Revolution were big on emancipation, often times in their wills they would emancipate their slaves.
However as the 19th century got started and the economy of the South started to change, you saw slavery actually growing whereas before it was looking like it was on the way out. The Southern political elite also became more entrenched in their support of slavery and radical in their opposition to any reforms of the system. Southern society itself became much less open to outside opinions. Where there was a vein of Southern thinkers for many years who thought of slavery as an evil that should eventually be abolished, by the mid-19th century there were instances of Southerners who published such thoughts being ran out of town, beaten, or et cetera.
To me the question as to where America got slavery isn’t that interesting. The answer is, “same place all other European plantation colonies got it: out of a necessity for lots of labor in a land without lots of laborers, it made economic sense to make use of slavery on a large scale.” What’s more interesting is exploring why slavery in America really started to grow during the early 19th century and why Southern society became much more radicalized in regard to slavery. All of this actually at a time when the rest of the world at large was moving in the other direction.
My high-school level of history knowledge says that a lot of it had to do with the invention of the cotton gin, making cotton a practical crop that was widely adopted across the south. Slavery became more economically useful when there was an agricultural product that could be widely sold at a high price. How relevant was the cotton gin, actually? I have no doubt that my high school textbook oversimplified.
It can be fairly said that the cotten gin (cotton engine) transformed America’s status as an unimportant trade partner to one of significance and power. The only cotton that could be grown in America was a low-growing variety that had a ratio of seeds to cotton of 3:1. To separate the seeds by hand was so labor intensive that even the cost of the slave labor to do the work was prohibitive. Most cotton in England was imported from India at that time, but after the invention of the cotton gin, nearly all of the considerable imports came from America. This made a lot of people rich, although not the inventor, Eli Whitney.
I should also mention that the ability to remove the seeds easily meant that much more labor was needed to harvest. America went from almost zero cotton export when the gin was invented to something like 2 billion pounds by 1860, and slave states went from six to fifteen. The north was complicit in this effort and sold nearly a million slaves south as plantation labor.
Well, the abolitionists of the period actively encouraged finding alternative production to cane-sugar…
Many at the time resented the do-goodery of middle class women agitating against slavery and refusing Jamaican grown sugar whilst their own poor were shoved up chimneys.
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After the Black Death serfs formed an extreme minority of the population; indentured servitude and use of children would be more common from the 17th to 18th centuries; and the Irish only came over as labour in Britain ( not as slaves or necessarily always cheaper labour ) in the 19th century.
Serfdom was abolished in France earlier, but by the 19th century being a poor labourer sucked just as much. As it did in every country in the world irrespective of whether you were English, Russian, American or Indian. Just better than being an actual owned slave.
That would be news to the Romans, let alone the Islamic world; and in India.
Slavery flourished in China of course, but I don’t know if they had public auctions; nor if these were held in the Caribbean and Latin America where 95% of the Atlantic Trade of slaves ended up. For some reason the Spanish & Portuguese get a free pass, whilst the Anglo Americans are reviled.
As do the Arabs, who did a brisk business throughout west and central Africa well before and past the beginning and end of slavery in America.
Serfdom was abolished in England earlier than France…1580s vs 1789.
It’s worth mentioning that in the 1650s Oliver Cromwell sold 50,000 Irish Catholics into slavery. It may have been a small percentage of the population, but 50K isn’t chicken feed, and the fact that he could even do something like that suggests that the basic idea of slavery wasn’t alien to English thinking at the time.
As an extreme royalist I would claim that Cromwell was a disgusting little piece of human waste whose feeble-minded treachery was not untypical of the time, but whose justifications for his conduct would have been too long-winded and murky to have listened to. He was not an articulate man.
However, he — or rather the Parliament in which name he primarily acted — also sent Scots calvinists and English royalists into the same slavery, or rather indentured servitude which was not for life. Not just the Irish,
Still, no-one ever claimed the idea of slavery was alien to British thinking, or the thinking of anywhere else in the world. Slavery was the natural condition of all pre-christian civilisations from Egypt to Greece and Africa. Just that it was alien to British soil. After the Norman conquest. Slaves became serfs, but serfdom is not the same thing as chattel slavery. You had rather more rights and couldn’t be whipped to death.
In Rome, I remember a slave killing himself by repeatedly dashing his head against a wall. And if a master was murdered his slaves were executed for not preventing it.