Somerset v Stewart bans slavery altogether

Suppose that the famous 1772 Somerset v Stewart case had gone even further and essentially banned slavery in Britain and perhaps the wider empire. What are the consequences of:

1. An empire-wide ban
2. A ban limited to Britain
 
Interesting question: although the likelihood of this happening without a substantial POD beforehand is honestly rather low-particularly as the OTL ruling only applied to England and Wales(though, as per Wiki, Scotland banned it soon after in a separate case, in all three cases, it's lack of justification in common law was cited as a reason.)-but for the sake of this scenario, let's say an empire wide ban actually does happen.

It would be significantly more controversial than it was in 1837 IOTL when a genuine majority, particularly amongst the middle classes, generally supported abolition in Britain itself; 65 years earlier, abolitionism, while it did have it's supporters back then, was not yet a truly major force on either side of the Atlantic, not even in Britain itself.

What happens in the Colonies? Well.....this is honestly quite debatable. It could go any number of ways, but a couple that strike me as interesting eventual possibilities are, either the southern colonies break off and try to go off on their own(though this seems a bit unlikely), or it may mollify existing abolitionist elements up North enough to the point where they may be more hesitant to break away(which could lead to London making some significant concessions to the Northern colonies later on), or perhaps even both.

But again.....none of this is likely without a major POD.

As for the latter option, though,.....that probably doesn't change very much from OTL.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
Some notes here:

-- First of all, Lord Mansfield very explicitly observed that there was no justification in common law for slavery, which meant that it could be made legal only by statutory law. There being no statute to legalise slavery in England and Wales (nor, indeed, in Scotland), he ruled that it was not legal.

-- An Empire-wide ban could easily be subverted by any given colony, simply by having its legislature pass a statute legalising slavery. And that's just in the cases where such statutes did not yet exist.

-- Overruling such colonial statutes would requite a statute in itself, laid down by Parliament and thus binding all the Empire. That statute would have to explicitly ban slavery. In OTL, this of course happened exactly like that, being the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.

-- Note that the British Empire wasn't a strictly uniform whole, having protectorates, client states, semi-autonomous regions of all sorts... and that the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 did not automatically apply there. Even if it did in theory (such as in the case of African colonies), there was still a lot of slavery going on there (Africans owning and selling Africans to other Africans and to Arabs), and there was little that Britain could do to effectively stop that on short notice.

All in all, I rather think that even if Lord Mansfield went all-out on an Empire-wide ban, there would have been no way to make it stick, and the history of slavery would have proceeded broadly as per OTL.
 
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