Slavery in Britain

Slavery in Britain existed even before the Roman period from AD 43 to AD 410, and the practice endured in various forms in the English overseas possessions and much of the British Empire until the 19th century. English merchants, especially from the ports of Liverpool, London, and Bristol, controlled a significant part of the Transatlantic slave trade, until the Slave Trade Act 1807 prohibited the Atlantic slave trade in the British Empire. After the act was passed, Britain interdicted the international transatlantic slave trade both diplomatically and with the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron, established in 1808. After the ending of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the Royal Navy had the ships available to back up diplomatic efforts to end slavery, by both increasing resources for the West Africa Squadron from 1818 and, when diplomatic pressure on the Barbary corsairs proved insufficient, by bombarding Algiers in 1816 in a ferocious engagement.

In England the Norman Conquest resulted in the gradual merger of the pre-conquest institution of slavery into serfdom in the midst of other economic upheavals. Given the widespread socio-political changes afterwards, slaves were no longer treated differently from other individuals in either English law or formal custom. By the middle of the 12th century, the institution of slavery as it had existed prior to the Norman conquest had fully disappeared, but other forms of unfree servitude continued for some centuries.

English merchants were a significant force behind the Atlantic slave trade between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, but no legislation was passed to either formally legalize or abolish chattel slavery in the British Isles. Instead, the common law system, based on laws established since the Norman conquest governing legal protections of individuals, protected those residing in England from any formal form of slavery, and a formal legal precedent against the practice, extending to those who may have been enslaved under foreign jurisdictions, was eventually established by Somerset v Stewart (1772) 98 ER 499.

In Scotland, Coal mining slaves were still in use until 1799, when the Colliers (Scotland) Act 1799 established their freedom and made slavery and bondage unlawful.