Without knowing the facts (which is why I am here), I imagine that the British were responsible for more slaves than any other nation prior to the revolution.
When the US gained its independence, did it immediately take the lead?
Seems that the British were also ahead of the US in the move to abolition. Is it too cynical to observe that perhaps they just didn’t need slaves any more?
“Not needing slavery” is one way of putting it. The mill workers who processed the slave-picked cotton into thread sure felt like slaves themselves. They were, arguably, just as exploited and miserable as the pickers.
The industrial revolution allowed the rich mill owners to earn a living off the backs of the poor just as surely as the plantation owners lived off of their black pickers.
The above comes from Cotton: The Biography of a Revolutionary Fiber. A good read.
No. Even after the revolution, the British colonies had slaves, and the slave trade was quite lucrative. There was adamant opposition to ending it.
The British opposition to slavery was based on strict moral grounds that slavery was wrong.
It took some massive political maneuvering to begin to have laws against the slave trade. The story was told quite nicely in the film Amazing Grace
Wiki gives this distribution of the destinations of the approximately 11 million slaves transported across the Atlantic, 1519-1867:
Brazil 38.5%
British America (minus North America) 18.4%
Spanish Empire 17.5%
French Americas 13.6%
British North America 6.45%
English Americas 3.25%
Dutch West Indies 2.0%
Danish West Indies 0.3%
Note that the importation of slaves into the US ceased in 1808.
British slaveowners were concentrated in the Caribbean. They were very wealthy but relatively few in number and they weren’t in London. American slavery was much more widespread and supported a much larger population which had much more political power.
So in Britain, the abolitionists were able to eventually defeat the slaveowners by political means. In the United States, it took a war.
War helped. Once the French got in, the American Revolution became another round in their perpetual war. The British couldn’t concentrate troops in the American colonies because they had to defend (and attack) the Caribbean colonies that the French wanted (or had). I’ve read that more troops died in the Caribbean than in the future U.S. during those battles. In fact, because of disease, virtually all the troops that got sent there died. That was a major factor in public revulsion over protecting a small, wealthy segment of the population. A threat across the channel in France was one thing. Protecting slave plantations was quite different.
The song from the musical 1776, Molasses and Rum and Slaves was intended to illustrate the importance of the triangle trade to New England, but it serves even better to point out the Caribbean connection to the U.K.
There was a sidenote in a Revolutionary War article in What If?. It was almost a throwaway line:
“The French went immediate after the Caribbean, where it was worth far more than all the 13 colonies combined”
AN important distinction (one that British definitely don’t mind and have been known to encourage when convenient) is that the British ended slavery in England a long time before their colonies. Or for that matter, Irelanbd in practice was virtually a slave nation because the English dominated and appropriated the harvests (the Famine was only the culmination in a long series of famines, mostly stemming from the same cause).
Not cynical enough. Economics made defending the Caribbean cane sugar interest too expensive - the planters got a massive payoff for “freeing” the slaves in the Caribbean. Under slavery people had to be fed and clothed to some degree - freed they did not. In the early 1800’s the British were busy preventing the French from bringing in cane sugar from the Caribbean and sugar beet production started to take off.
The ruling class of Britain still had the Irish and they had no obligation to feed them either:
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~emeraldidyll/Ireland/Irish_History_to_Famine.htm
"The most shocking export figures concern butter. Butter was shipped in firkins, each one holding nine gallons. …That works out to be 822,681 gallons of butter exported to England from Ireland during nine months of the worst year of “famine”. "