General Background information

[Galveston Bay]

Slavery
The institution remains normal in Islamic nations and much of Africa, but the major powers of Britain, France and the Netherlands have agreed to end the TransAtlantic Slave trade and forced the Spanish and Portuguese to accept that fact. There however remains an illegal trade, and Portugal retains the right to transfers slaves from its African colonies (Angola mostly) to Brazil. The British with some French cooperation have a permanent Anti Slave patrol in the Atlantic and have established some colonies of freed Slaves to support that.

In the Caribbean slavery has ended in Hispaniola, Jamaica, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Gran Colombia and the Kingdom of Mexico. Although serfdom remains the norm in all of Spanish speaking America (with Native Americans and Mestizos being the serf class). Serfdom exists in Hispaniola and Cuba as well, being in effect for the mixed race Black population in Cuba and Caribbean Blacks and Creoles having imposed it on much of Hispaniola on their fellow Blacks. Serfdom also exists in the British Caribbean as the last slaves transferred to that status in 1825. The Anglo-Dutch settlers in South Africa have also imposed it on many of the African tribes in that area. The biggest areas of serfdom continue to be Russia, India, China, Indochina and Japan but the remainder of Europe has ended that practice.

Slavery remains an institution in the southern region of British North America, from Delaware to northern Florida and from Louisiana and parts of Missouri east and as far north as Kentucky and Virginia. The heaviest concentration of slaves remain in Virginia, North and South Carolina, and have extended into Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia where the massively profitable Cotton cash crop and the invention of the Cotton Gin and huge demand for cotton in Britain and New England cloth mills emerged. There are also huge numbers of slaves in Brazil who pick sugar cane while the Dutch have the practice in effect in the Dutch East Indies (buying them from the Moros in the southern Philippines and Java). The Andean Confederacy has de facto slaves in parts of its domain, but serf peonage is more common.

However, there is growing societal rejection of slavery in much of British North America, Britain itself, and the Irish are the harshest critics of all, while the French too have strongly rejected the practice and the Germans, Scandinavians and Poles equate it with serfdom and find it repugnant. A growing pressure exists in Britain to end the practice everywhere in the English speaking community, and there is strong support for that in Europe which is also tied to the growing pressure to end serfdom in Latin America, the Caribbean and Russia.

While not yet at the stage where a powerful political divide exists, that trend is powerful and moving forward. It is colliding with the strong economic interests tied to it, and the subsequent need by those profiting to justify it, which is leading to a mix of paternalism (White Mans burden) thinking and also a considerable amount of fear of a possible massive slave revolt in North America or Brazil.

Tensions grow every year….