DYLAN MATTHEWS QUOTE OF THE DAY

"...But the South's political influence within the British Empire would have been vastly smaller than its influence in the early American republic. For one thing, the South, like all other British dependencies, lacked representation in Parliament. The Southern states were colonies, and their interests were discounted by the British government accordingly. But the South was also simply smaller as a chunk of the British Empire's economy at the time than it was as a portion of America's. The British crown had less to lose from the abolition of slavery than white elites in an independent America did...." DM

The colonists initially, after The Seven Years War, didn't want taxation, representation or not. That came later.  See J C D Clark, "VII. Tom Paine and William Godwin", p 324.

Actually, a disproportionate percentage of total British trade came from the South in the form of raw cotton in the decades following the American Rebellion leading up to the Civil War. It was huge for both Britain and the colonies in general since so much of this trade was also tied up with Northern interests in banking, shipping, manufacturing, etc.

Modern Whiggish discussions of negro slavery are senseless in isolation from other institutions of its time, such as indentured servitude, serfdom, child labor, impressment, convict labor, non slave colonial labor, and working conditions of free labor of all kinds and of both sexes. Social political, and religious conditions, not strictly Whig class distinctions, were paramount throughout such topics.