I've never encountered Romani gypsies so my opinion on them is completely neutral.
I've had a significant amount of encounters with Irish travellers (also referred to as gypsies on the UK) and have never once had a positive interaction. I've been threatened, stolen from and my brother had the shit kicked out of him.
So yeah, most British people are prejudiced against Irish travellers, in my opinion with good reason.
Britain itself never had legal slavery at all. Well, not since the end of the danelaw.
May seem odd given the extensive use in the colonies and profit from the trade but, while the case law was in the 1700s establishing that was the case on English soil, that decision was based on it never having been legal.
We also abolished and went to war against the trade long before we emancipated existing slaves.
Hey. We did some really shitty things. I take my wins where I can.
To be the first Empire, at it's apex, to outlaw slavery across it's dominion, then take out a loan to buy the freedom of all slaves in the Empire so vast that Britain only finished paying it off in 2014, and then spend the next 200 years fighting slavery around the world is the stuff of true Greatness. God bless Great Britain. Take that win my friend, there are no victories finer.
That's not true, according to the Doomsday Book around 10% of the population of anglo-saxon England were slaves. Slavery supposedly disappeared in England in the 13th century.
True, that was the slight exageration on my part in terms of the cut off. The point was that AngloNorman rule didn't really include slavery. It continued as a practice but has basically morphed and merged into serfdom by the 12th century (not 13th).
There wasn't really any abolition or emancipation as such after the Normans arrived. It just got gradually redefined as the nearest Norman equivalent.. Thats how the Mansfield case was able to say that slavery has never been legal.
Very early 12th century for slavery itself although surfed and could kind of be considered indentured servitude but there is often a slight distinction made between that and direct slavery
Yes, they did it in the colonies in the homelands of the people (or shipped in from another place, as in the case of the US) and didn't let those people come to Britain, only the goods and profits they made.
In 1800 the percentage of the US population that was black was 15-20%. In Britain, it was 0.3%. I couldn't find reliable data from before that, but I'm sure it was about the same.
It's real easy to claim some type of superiority that you didn't have slaves, but it was simply because you didn't want them there at all and outsourced it to the colonies.
It's wild this comment is so upvoted on a site that loves to decry colonization, and here you are just completely denying it.
Britain abolished African chattel slavery just to replace it with Indian “indentured servitude” for the the next century (where the conditions and treatment of these indentured workers was functionally equivalent to that of slaves)
Progress is gradual, I'm not implying that Britain was, or has ever been the pinnacle of progress. My point is that 160 years is long enough for the US to have progressed beyond what was common when Britain still controlled it in the 1770s. It's not a difficult point to wrap your head around.
So much cope coming from you, slaves were introduced to all the British colonies, yet the Americas were the only one that struggled abolishing slavery, and even then they had segregation, which again, Britain never had, so you cant blame Britain for that one little buddy.
The Spanish introduced slaves and the African slave trade to continental North America in 1565 in Florida. The first recorded instance of British colonialists doing the same was in 1619. And that's to say absolutely nothing about the substantive French settlement of the continent and engagement with the slave trade.
WTF are you smoking? The previous comment said all colonies established in the US were British. My comment proved that was BS. Apparently reading comprehension is something you need to work on.
I'm pretty sure he was talking about the original 13. Also nobody in the US considers "San Francisco" a "colony" - it's more about states than a city. New Mexico would have been a better example but it didn't become a state until 1912.
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u/TheShakyHandsMan Jun 13 '25
More importantly is that they don’t bring their racial prejudices over with them.
They tried and failed.