Britain, Slaves, and Imperial Views

Hrm. This isn't so much of a WI as an observation....

I'm reading "Rough Crossings," Simon Schama's work about the Black loyalist exodus from America after the Revolution, and it's an interesting read. He touches on a surprising amoung of social mixing between blacks and white (Britons and Hessians) in the American south; "Ethiopian Balls," where black women and men would dance with British soldiers, that kind of thing, poor whites marrying blacks in 1780s London (to many people's horrors).

I wonder how much of this relates to the difference in how Britons and Americans viewed slaves, especially American ones. Although Clinton was no abolitionist, he felt like the Empire owed the slaves obligations for their services in the war; it's an odd paternalism.

So whereas to Americans, blacks were a servile underclass living alongside them, to Britons they were just another subject people in the Empire; not as good as Englishmen, but not subhuman. (Although there was a whiff of that from many Britons...)

Thoughts?
 
I know that there was a fairly significant community of black people in Canada, first in the maritimes, then in the prairies....until they intermixed with the neighbours and dispersed for other reasons (WW1, going to America in the 20th c., decline of farming etc.).

Don't know much about Britain proper though.
 
Frederick Douglass gave a speech which caused a bit of a stir in 1846 by saying "Fuck America, it's liberty and democracy are shams. Britain is the nation which doesn't think I'm property."
 
As I understand it it was generally the old India hands which had a much more enlightened attitude (still not equals but no more inherently inferior than anyone else who isn't a Anglo-Saxon Anglican). In the West Indies attitudes were much more in-line (in fact identical) to the US South (sub-humans).
 
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