Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that answer the question.
Query: When was slavery abolished in England?
Many of the supporters thought the Act would lead to the end of slavery.[2] Slavery on English soil was unsupported in English law and that position was confirmed in Somersett's Case in 1772, but it remained legal in most of the British Empire until the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833.
Ashoka, who ruled the Maurya Empire from 269–232 BCE, abolished the slave trade but not slavery. The Qin dynasty, which ruled China from 221 to 206 BC, abolished slavery and discouraged serfdom. However, many of its laws were overturned when the dynasty was overthrown. Slavery was again abolished, by Wang Mang, in China in 17 CE but was reinstituted after his assassination.
Although the legal implications of the judgement are unclear when analysed by lawyers, the judgement was generally taken at the time to have determined that slavery did not exist under English common law and was thus prohibited in England. 
As a result, by 1774, between 10,000 and 15,000 slaves gained freedom in England.
The decision did not apply to British overseas territories; e.g. the American colonies had established slavery by positive laws. Somersett's case became a significant part of the common law of slavery in the English-speaking world and it helped launch the movement to abolish slavery.
The Anti-Slavery Society estimated that there were 2,000,000 slaves in the early 1930s Ethiopia, out of an estimated population of between 8 and 16 million. Slavery continued in Ethiopia until the brief Second Italo-Abyssinian War in October 1935, when it was abolished by order of the Italian occupying forces. In response to pressure by Western Allies of World War II Ethiopia officially abolished slavery and serfdom after regaining its independence in 1942. On 26 August 1942 Haile Selassie issued a proclamation outlawing slavery.
Through abolitionist connections, he was welcomed there by members of the London Agency Anti-Slavery Society. According to the historian Thomas M. Morgan, Smith enjoyed the relative racial tolerance in Scotland and England, which officially abolished slavery in 1833. (New York abolished all slavery in 1827.) He studied and graduated at the top of his class. He obtained a bachelor's degree in 1835, a master's degree in 1836, and a medical degree in 1837. He completed an internship in Paris.
In the 1770s, blacks throughout New England began sending petitions to northern legislatures demanding freedom; by 1800, all of the northern states had abolished slavery or set measures in place to gradually reduce it. While free, blacks often had to struggle with reduced civil rights, such as restrictions on voting, as well as racism, segregation, or physical violence. Vermont abolished slavery in 1777, while it was still independent, and when it joined the United States as the 14th state in 1791 it was the first state to have done so. All the other Northern states abolished slavery between 1780 and 1804, leaving the slave states of the South as defenders of the "peculiar institution". Massachusetts abolished slavery in 1780, and several other Northern states adopted gradual emancipation. In 1804, New Jersey became the last original Northern state to embark on gradual emancipation. Slavery was proscribed in the federal Northwest Territory under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, passed just before the U.S. Constitution was ratified. The free black population increased from 8% to 13.5% from 1790 to 1810; most of whom lived in the Mid-Atlantic States, New England, and the Upper South, where most of the slave population lived at the time.
Townsend's organisation was not affiliated to any national organisation, neither was it a partner organisation for Birmingham's (men's) Anti-Slavery Organisation. In fact women like Elizabeth Heyrick, Eliza Wigham and Jane Smeal believed that slavery should not be gradually abolished but it should be immediately abolished. The Sheffield organisation was the first Anti-Slavery organisation in Britain to propose an immediate end to slavery. Conversely Townsend's organisation took a more conservative line in 1839 when they followed the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society's policy of supporting a more gradual move.
In 1905, an end of slavery in Mauritania was declared by the colonial French administration but the vastness of Mauritania mostly gave the law very few successes. In 1981, Mauritania became the last country in the world to abolish slavery, when a presidential decree abolished the practice. However, no criminal laws were passed to enforce the ban. In 2007, "under international pressure", the government passed a law allowing slaveholders to be prosecuted. Despite this, the number of slaves in the country has been estimated by Global Slavery Index to be 43,000 (or 1.058% of the population) in 2015 and by the organization SOS Slavery to be up to 600,000 (or 17% of the population). Sociologist Kevin Bales and Global Slavery Index estimate that Mauritania has the highest proportion of people in slavery of any country in the world. While other countries in the region have people in "slavelike conditions", the situation in Mauritania is "unusually severe", according to African history professor Bruce Hall.
The continuing anti-slavery movement in Europe became a reason and an excuse for the conquest and colonization of the Africa. It was the central theme of the Brussels Anti-Slavery Conference 1889–90. During the Scramble for Africa, an early but secondary focus of all colonial regimes was the suppression of slavery and the slave trade. In French West Africa, following conquest and abolition by the French, over a million slaves fled from their masters to earlier homes between 1906 and 1911. In Madagascar, the French abolished slavery in 1896 and approximately 500,000 slaves were freed. Slavery was abolished in the French controlled Sahel by 1911. Independent nations attempting to westernize or impress Europe sometimes cultivated an image of slavery suppression. In response to European pressure, the Sokoto Caliphate abolished slavery in 1900 and Ethiopia officially abolished slavery in 1932. Colonial powers were mostly successful in abolishing slavery, though slavery remained active in Africa even though it has gradually moved to a wage economy. Slavery was never fully eradicated in Africa.
Spanish slavery, on the other hand, declined in the Philippines with the decline of slavery in Spain. It was abolished in Spain in 1820, when Spanish liberals took power and reimposed the Spanish Constitution of 1812 on Ferdinand VII, in Puerto Rico in 1873, and in Cuba in 1886. It was completely abolished after industrialization in all places took place during the nineteenth century.
The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was principally a Quaker society founded in the eighteenth century by Thomas Clarkson. The slave trade had been abolished throughout the British Empire in 1807. In August 1833 the British government passed the Slavery Abolition Act, advocated by William Wilberforce, which abolished slavery in the British Empire from August 1834, when some 800,000 people in the British empire became free.
Ultimately slavery would be abolished by statute in both England and throughout the colonies pursuant to the Slavery Abolition Act 1833.
This law made Upper Canada "the first British colony to abolish slavery". The Act remained in force until 1833 when the British Parliament's "Slavery Abolition Act" abolished slavery in most parts of the British Empire.
One of the first protests against slavery came from German and Dutch Quakers in Pennsylvania in 1688. One of the most significant milestones in the campaign to abolish slavery throughout the world occurred in England in 1772, with British judge Lord Mansfield, whose opinion in Somersett's Case was widely taken to have held that slavery was illegal in England. This judgement also laid down the principle that slavery contracted in other jurisdictions could not be enforced in England. In 1777, Vermont, at the time an independent nation, became the first portion of what would become the United States to abolish slavery. France abolished slavery in 1794. All the Northern states abolished slavery; New Jersey in 1804 was the last to act. None of the Southern or border states abolished slavery before the American Civil War.
Slavery was abolished throughout much of the British Empire by the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 but as early as 1706 the common law had recognised that as soon as a slave came to England, he became free. The courts did not recognise contracts which were equivalent to slavery or servitude.
In May 1772, Lord Mansfield's judgment in the "Somersett's Case" emancipated a slave in England and thus helped launch the movement to abolish slavery. The case ruled that slaves could not be transported out of England against their will, but did not actually abolish slavery in England. However, many campaigners, including Granville Sharp, mistakenly believed that the Somerset case meant that slavery was unsupported by law in England and that no authority could be exercised on slaves entering English or Scottish soil. In 1785, English poet William Cowper wrote:
During the early 19th century, slavery expanded rapidly in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States, while at the same time the new republics of mainland Spanish America became committed to the gradual abolition of slavery. During the Spanish American wars for independence (1810–1826), slavery was abolished in most of Latin America, though it continued until 1873 in Puerto Rico, 1886 in Cuba, and 1888 in Brazil (where it was abolished by the Lei Áurea, the "Golden Law"). Chile declared freedom of wombs in 1811, followed by the United Provinces of the River Plate in 1813, but without abolishing slavery completely. While Chile abolished slavery in 1823, Argentina did so with the signing of the Argentine Constitution of 1853. Colombia abolished slavery in 1852. Slavery was abolished in Uruguay during the Guerra Grande, by both the government of Fructuoso Rivera and the government in exile of Manuel Oribe.[38]
The institution of slavery in North America existed from the earliest years of the colonial period until 1865 when the Thirteenth Amendment permanently abolished slavery throughout the entire United States. It was also abolished among the sovereign Indian tribes in Indian Territory by new peace treaties which the US required after the war.
The Arab slave trade was most active in West Asia, North Africa, and Southeast Africa. In the early 20th century (post-World War I), slavery was gradually outlawed and suppressed in Muslim lands, largely due to pressure exerted by Western nations such as Britain and France. Slavery in the Ottoman Empire was abolished in 1924 when the new Turkish Constitution disbanded the Imperial Harem and made the last concubines and eunuchs free citizens of the newly proclaimed republic. Slavery in Iran was abolished in 1929. Among the last states to abolish slavery were Saudi Arabia and Yemen, which abolished slavery in 1962 under pressure from Britain; Oman in 1970; and Mauritania in 1905, 1981, and again in August 2007. However, slavery claiming the sanction of Islam is documented at present in the predominantly Islamic countries of the Sahel, and is also practiced in territories controlled by Islamist rebel groups, as in Libya.
In the 1770s, blacks throughout New England began sending petitions to northern legislatures demanding freedom. Five of the Northern self-declared states adopted policies to at least gradually abolish slavery: Pennsylvania (1780), New Hampshire and Massachusetts (1783), Connecticut and Rhode Island (1784). Vermont had abolished slavery in 1777, while it was still independent, and when it joined the United States as the 14th state in 1791, it was the first state to join untainted by slavery. These state jurisdictions thus enacted the first abolition laws in the Americas. By 1804 (including, New York (1799), New Jersey (1804)), all of the northern states had abolished slavery or set measures in place to gradually abolish it.
According to Noel Turnball, a professor from RMIT University, more systematic forms of PR began as the public started organizing for social and political movements. The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was established in England in 1787. It published books, posters and hosted public lectures in England advocating against slavery. Industries that relied on slavery attempted to persuade the middle-class that it was necessary and that slaves had humane living conditions. The Slave Trade was abolished in 1807. In the US, the movement to abolish slavery began in 1833 with the establishment of the American Anti-Slavery Society, using tactics adopted from the British abolitionist movement. According to Edward Bernays, the US abolitionist movement used "every available device of communication, appeal and action," such as petitions, pamphlets, political lobbying, local societies, and boycotts. The South responded by defending slavery on the basis of economics, religion and the constitution. In some cases propaganda promoting the abolition of slavery was forbidden in The South and abolitionists were killed or jailed. Public relations also played a role in abolitionist movements in France, Australia and in Europe.
Slavery was first abolished by the French Republic in 1794, but Napoleon revoked that decree in 1802. In 1815, the Republic abolished the slave trade but the decree did not come into effect until 1826. France re-abolished slavery in her colonies in 1848 with a general and unconditional emancipation.
William Wilberforce's Slave Trade Act 1807 abolished the slave trade in the British Empire. It was not until the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 that the institution finally was abolished, but on a gradual basis. Since slave owners in the various colonies (not only the Caribbean) were losing their unpaid labourers, the government set aside £20 million for compensation but it did not offer the former slaves reparations.
Abolitionists in the Americas and in Europe became vocal opponents of the slave trade throughout the 19th century. The importation of slaves to the colonies was often outlawed years before the end of the institution of slavery itself. It was well into the 19th century before many slaves in the Caribbean were legally free. The trade in slaves was abolished in the British Empire through the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807. Men, women and children who were already enslaved in the British Empire remained slaves, however, until Britain passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. When the Slavery Abolition Act came into force in 1834, roughly 700,000 slaves in the British West Indies immediately became free; other enslaved workers were freed several years later after a period of forced apprenticeship. Slavery was abolished in the Dutch Empire in 1814. Spain abolished slavery in its empire in 1811, with the exceptions of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo; Spain ended the slave trade to these colonies in 1817, after being paid ₤400,000 by Britain. Slavery itself was not abolished in Cuba until 1886. France abolished slavery in its colonies in 1848.
The first large-scale move to abolish slavery by the international community came in 1926 with the Slavery Convention and again in 1957 when the Supplementary Convention came into power. The 1926 Slavery Convention provides the first international definition of slavery as:
Although the exact legal implications of the judgement are unclear when analysed by lawyers, the judgement was generally taken at the time to have determined that slavery did not exist under English common law and was thus prohibited in England.[18] The decision did not apply to the British overseas territories; by then, for example, the American colonies had established slavery by positive laws.[19] Somersett's case became a significant part of the common law of slavery in the English-speaking world and it helped launch the movement to abolish slavery.[20]