ABSTRACT
In 1772, Granville Sharp obtained Lord Mansfield's judgement that the law of England could not recognize the ownership of a slave, and William Wilberforce and his supporters exerted increasing pressure to banish slavery from the British colonies. The Declaration of Independence of the newly formed United States of North America apparently did not contemplate the black man as human; slavery remained firmly entrenched there in spite of any equalitarian professions. The world had been profoundly shaken by the new ideas, and slavery underwent increased criticism; before the nineteenth century was far advanced the barriers had begun to fall, and abolition was carried out as rapidly as proved feasible in all the British colonies. In South Africa, the Dutch were conspicuous sufferers; already disliking the new British conquerors of the Cape, they viewed the liberation of their slaves as either a piece of disastrous sentimentality or a deliberate plot for their ruin.
