No, the British Empire did not spontaneously "end slavery". Credit for that goes to several generations of slave revolts—including the successful Haitian Revolution of 1804—and sustained pressure from radical social movements pushing for abolition.
Also note: the Abolition Act of 1833 was explicitly racist, declaring that enslaved persons were not humans but property, that therefore abolition amounted to expropriation, and that slave owners must therefore be compensated for their loss.
Not only did the British government pay an extraordinary sum to slave owners in a perverse act of reverse reparations, it required that slaves *pay for their own freedom* by working unpaid for a further 8 years after abolition ("apprenticeship", they called it).
Britain continued to openly countenance and profit from slavery in its colonies for more than a century after the Abolition Act, freeing slaves in Nigeria only in 1916, in Sierra Leone only in 1923, and in the West Indian colonies and the Cape colony only in 1938.
The British Empire engaged in state-sponsored trafficking of human beings for more than 200 years. To claim credit for abolition is like a serial killer expecting credit for being made to stop murdering. We should be talking instead about remembrance and reparations.
It’s wild, that the Empire would claim the bodies of the enslaved, claim their lives and their labour, and then claim also their struggle against slavery as a moral victory of the Empire itself. They take everything and leave nothing.
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