WI: the English ban slavery all along?

In OTL Queen Elizabeth I told Hawkins:

"...if any of the Africans were carried away without their own consent, it would be detestable, and call down the vengeance of Heaven upon the undertakers."

He reassured her that as they were introduced to Christianity and civilisation, they did not detest it, and it was in their interest.

What if she somehow found out the brutal reality, and made England an anti-slavery crusading power from her reign onwards? What impact would that have on the later American colonies, particularly the Caribbean and the South?
 
England did ban slavery all along. Slavery has never been legal in England.
What goes on outside of England of course is a different matter....

I don't see how it could happen, its having a nation behave consistently in quite a modern, overly noble and asb way. Even if Elizabeth I is against slavery you'll still get English people dabbling in it during her reign and there's bound to be some subsequent monarch who doesn't really care about Africans he is never going to see but does rather like money.

I guess you'd somehow have to have it confirmed that slavery is illegal from an earlier point and somehow make it so that English law extends to Englishmen wherever they are. But even then there's nothing that can be done about it, there isn't exactly much of a navy to go around picking on traders and cutting off a source of wealth for England.
 
To get this to stick you'd either need something powerful ideologically or to have being anti-slavery be in England's economic interests. Pretty had to do either way.
 
To get this to stick you'd either need something powerful ideologically or to have being anti-slavery be in England's economic interests. Pretty had to do either way.

I'm imagining something ideological, as a part of the developing English national identity. "We are God's righteous, and only corrupted Papist Frogs and Dagos would trade in humans".
 
To get this to stick you'd either need something powerful ideologically or to have being anti-slavery be in England's economic interests. Pretty had to do either way.

The second will be very hard, but I wonder about the first in Thespitron's "A More Personal Union." Word has to be getting around about how brutally the Spanish slaves were treated,a nd there are some fighting alongside them now.

I'd say even ideologically, it would take something with the enormous impact of what has been going on there to really get it established int he minds of the people that slavery is wrong. Shakespearen plays as anti-slavery pamphlets in his ATL are an interesting thought, though.
 
Well you can forget all the British Caribbean colonies and probably the US colonies south of Virginia. Without slavery those places are pestilential death traps that simply aren't worth it.
 
I'm imagining something ideological, as a part of the developing English national identity. "We are God's righteous, and only corrupted Papist Frogs and Dagos would trade in humans".

That's going to be hard to maintain when the biggest slave trader in the world is the Netherlands.
 
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