In 1834, Parliament—persuaded by powerful bureaucrats who insisted that free labor would prove more efficient than slave labor—imposed emancipation in all the empire’s far-flung domains. Still, southern enslavers might have taken comfort in the fact that even as Britain freed 700,000 Caribbean slaves, slavery continued to expand, not only in the United States, where statehood was on the docket for Arkansas and Florida, but in two other places—Cuba and Brazil.
