Slavery in Britain

Despite being contrary to the laws of the UK, practices described as "modern slavery" still exist in Britain and have often involved the effects created by human traffickers attacking those from poorer countries, such as those undertaking various crimes victimizing Vietnamese nationals.

The country's government has, in a public statement, noted how "gangs exploit vulnerable individuals to transport [illegal] substances", and "who is recognised as a victim of modern slavery" includes both men and women as well as adults and children.

Specifically, in 2022, a full "12,727 potential victims of modern slavery were referred to the Home Office in 2021, representing a 20% increase compared to the preceding year".

[24] One of the earliest accounts of slaves from early medieval Britain come from the description of fair-haired boys from York seen in Rome by Pope Gregory the Great, in a biography written by an anonymous monk.

[27] In 870, Vikings besieged and captured the stronghold of Alt Clut (the capital of the Kingdom of Strathclyde) and in 871 most of the site's inhabitants were taken, most probably by Olaf the White and Ivar the Boneless, to the Dublin slave markets.

[34] In 1102, the church Council of London convened by Anselm issued a decree: "Let no one dare hereafter to engage in the infamous business, prevalent in England, of selling men like animals.

[37] De facto slavery in the form of forced labour did still occur though, as in the carrying away of over a thousand children from Wales to be "servants", which is recorded as taking place in 1401.

Like slaves, indentured servants could be bought and sold, could not marry without the permission of their owner, were subject to physical punishment, and saw their obligation to labour enforced by the courts.

[42][failed verification] An alternative practice, borrowed from the Spanish, was to commute the death sentence and allow the use of convicts as a labour force for the colonies.

[46] During the early colonial period, the Scots and the English, along with other western European nations, dealt with their "Gypsy problem" by transporting them as slaves in large numbers to North America and the Caribbean.

There are reports of Barbary slave raids across Western Europe, including France, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, England and as far north as Iceland.

Item 20 of The Grand Remonstrance,[51] a list of grievances against Charles I presented to him in 1641, contains the following complaint about Barbary pirates of the Ottoman Empire abducting English people into slavery:[52] And although all this was taken upon pretense of guarding the seas, yet a new unheard-of tax of ship-money was devised, and upon the same pretense, by both which there was charged upon the subject near £700,000 some years, and yet the merchants have been left so naked to the violence of the Turkish pirates, that many great ships of value and thousands of His Majesty's subjects have been taken by them, and do still remain in miserable slavery.The privateer Sir John Hawkins of Plymouth, a notable Elizabethan seafarer, is widely acknowledged to be "the Pioneer of the English Slave Trade".

During a second voyage in 1564, his crew captured 400 Africans and sold them at Rio de la Hacha in present-day Colombia, making a 60% profit for his financiers.

[60] He was famous for his poetry and music, and his friends included the novelist Laurence Sterne, David Garrick the actor and the Duke and Duchess of Montague.

The ships were loaded with export crops and commodities, the products of slave labour, such as cotton, sugar and rum, and returned to Britain to sell the items.

[83] No legislation was ever passed in England that legalised slavery, unlike the Portuguese Ordenações Manuelinas (1481–1514), the Dutch East India Company Ordinances (1622), and France's Code Noir (1685), and this caused confusion when English people brought home slaves they had legally purchased in the colonies.

After R v. Knowles, ex parte Somersett (1772) 20 State Tr 1 the law remained unsettled, although the decision was a significant advance for, at the least, preventing the forceable removal of anyone from England, whether or not a slave, against his will.

Abolitionists widely circulated the view that it was declared that the condition of slavery did not exist under English law, although Mansfield later said that all that he decided was that a slave could not be forcibly removed from England against his will.

[92] After reading about Somersett's Case, Joseph Knight, an enslaved African who had been purchased by his master John Wedderburn in Jamaica and brought to Scotland, left him.

Slaves were owned by the Anglican Church's Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPGFP), which had sugar plantations in the West Indies.

The Bishop of Exeter, Henry Phillpotts, and three business colleagues acted as trustees for John Ward, 1st Earl of Dudley when he received compensation for 665 slaves.

Also, slave labour produced the major consumer goods that were the basis of world trade during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: coffee, cotton, rum, sugar, and tobacco.

[101] While some historians have suggested slavery was necessary for the Industrial Revolution (on the grounds that American slave plantations produced most of the raw cotton for the British textiles market and the British textiles market was the vanguard of the Industrial Revolution), historian Eric Hilt has noted that it is not clear if this is actually true; there is no evidence that cotton could not have been mass-produced by yeoman farmers rather than slave plantations if the latter had not existed (as their existence tended to force yeoman farmers into subsistence farming) and there is some evidence that they certainly could have.

[109] Additionally, Thomas Sowell has noted, citing historians Clement Eaton and Eugene Genovese, that three-quarters of Southern white families owned no slaves at all.

[115][116][117][118][119] University College London has developed a database examining the commercial, cultural, historical, imperial, physical and political legacies of slavery in Britain.

[120] The direct roles that individual members of the country's monarchy had in slave trading, particularly in terms of both controlling day-to-day business operations and also amassing personal profits, has resulted in specific criticism of the governing institution itself.

The ruler Charles II, who reigned as King of England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1660 to 1685, granted the charter of the Royal African Company (RAC) in 1663.

"I cannot describe the depths of my personal sorrow at the suffering of many, as I continue to deepen my understanding of slavery's enduring impact," concluded an official statement from Buckingham Palace.

[121] A publication of the Australian Institute of International Affairs (AIIA) on 9 November 2023, a think tank based out of that country, analyzed the King's widely reported state visit to Kenya and described its reconciling events as seeming "effusive in" their "repentance".

The statement noted that "[c]ollecting the evidence of wrongdoings poses a... challenge" when detailing the actions against Kenya and other subjects of colonialism since "[m]any of those actively engaged in the slave trade were leaders or executives in the largest companies and institutions of the time."