Comment by defrost
21 hours ago
England literally supplied the early American (and later Australian) colonies with slaves "indentured for the term of their natural lives".
The "American colonies" were, of course, not limited to the modern USofA; Sir John Hawkins of Plymouth aka "the Pioneer of the English Slave Trade". formed a slave-trading syndicate in 1554.
He sailed with three ships for the Caribbean via Sierra Leone, hijacked a Portuguese slave ship and sold the 300 slaves from it in Santo Domingo. During a second voyage in 1564, his crew captured 400 Africans and sold them at Rio de la Hacha in present-day Colombia, making a 60% profit for his financiers.
Saying England implies in a way implies that the colonists in the Thirteen Colonies were in any way less complicit for making slavery widespread in the North American colonies. They were mostly autonomous and self regulating and chose to adopt the institution of slavery. They could have just treated the black slaves the same way as white indentured servants.
Caribbean colonies were of course quite different.
The colonists of which we speak were (mostly) English people working for English VC's and they were entirely complicit with the English what with being English.