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Somerset v Stewart (1772) 98 ER 499 (also known as Sommersett v Steuart, Somersett's case, and the Mansfield Judgment) is a judgment of the English Court of King's Bench in 1772, relating to the right of a slave on English soil not to be forcibly removed from the country and sent to Jamaica for sale.
1787 Wedgwood anti-slavery medallion designed by Josiah Wedgwood for the British anti-slavery campaign. Abolitionism in the United Kingdom was the movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to end the practice of slavery, whether formal or informal, in the United Kingdom, the British Empire and the world, including ending the Atlantic slave trade.
Slavery was abolished in the directly governed colonies, like Canada or Mauritius, through buying out the owners from 1834, under the terms of the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. [12] Most slaves were freed, with exceptions and delays provided for territories administered by East India Company , in India , Ceylon , and Saint Helena .
Granville Sharp's efforts culminated in 1772 when he was instrumental in securing Lord Mansfield's ruling in Somerset v Stewart, which held that slavery had no basis in English law. In 1787, Sharp and Thomas Clarkson founded the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade .
The book is a narrative history of the late 18th- and early 19th-century anti-slavery movement in the British Empire. [4] The story centers around a group of British abolitionist campaigners and traces their campaign from its beginnings with Somerset v Stewart in 1772 until full emancipation for all British slaves was legally granted in 1838 ...
Slavery on English soil was unsupported in English law and that position was confirmed in Somerset's case in 1772, but it remained legal in most of the British Empire until the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 (3 & 4 Will. 4. c. 73).
The British Empire began granting independence to all its Colonies from India, to Africa to the Pacific. The last instance of capital punishment in the United Kingdom was carried out in 1964. It was formally abolished under the Human Rights Act 1998. Harold Wilson allows individual petitions to Strasbourg in 1968.
Curiously, the opinion made no reference either to the abolition of trade in serfs of 1102 by the Council of Westminster, [c] or to the decision in In the matter of Cartwright, 11 Elizabeth; 2 Rushworth's Coll 468 (1569), a case often cited as authority for the statement "that England has too pure an air for a slave to breathe in." [d] Nor did ...