movement towards legalistic Parliamentary "abolition" was FORCED by slave uprisings in the Caribbean. eg Barbados' "Bussa Rebellion" (1816) Guyana/Demarara (1823) & Jamaica's "Christmas Rebellion" or "Baptist War" (1831), all crushed with brutal violence by colonial authorities.
profits of slavers in the "West Indies" were also declining in the face of competition from slave labour regimes in Cuba, Brazil, & the US South. The numbers/proportions of free ppl of colour were growing in many British slave colonies, more forcefully demanding civic rights.
in Britain, the movement for abolition was heterogenous. It had genuine popular elements and huge mobilisations and was influenced by some leading Black figures and thinkers. Many were "immediatists", demanding immediate, uncompensated abolition.
a substantial and powerful strand of the movement were more interested in bourgeois economism, rationalising the British state, incorporating a section of the middle class into the polity and developing the Empire away from "West Indian" sugar.
this was a complex struggle which overlapped with many others at the time - wake of post-French Revolution crackdown, early workers struggles. Culminated in Reform Act (defeat for most) & parliamentary Abolition that paid millions to slavers & changed so little for Black ppl.
large sections of capital and the ruling class, significantly the Crown, were staunchly opposed to any abolition at all and it was only the popular element of the rebellion and agency of enslaved ppl themselves that forced the issue and forced a reorganisation of the state.
the actual division of the ruling class at the time quickly gave way to sanctification of Wilberforce (as reactionary a reformer as you could find) & the national myth of the virtuous British abolition, a white supremacist legend dominant among British ppl of various backgrounds.
as always, these memory wars are not about history they are about now. Ppl like Hannan know what they are trying to protect and defend against - a contemporary world still based on legacies of colonial wealth.
we can't be diverted from the legacies that matter most - reparations, immigration laws, anti-Blackness in policing and prisons, racial divisions of labour and pay, etc - not capitulate to confected battles about Fawlty Towers.
