Timeline June 1772

Events in June 1772 3

• 1772 Gaspee Affair American colonists burn a British revenue schooner On the night of 9-10 June 1772, a group of Rhode Island colonists boarded the grounded British customs schooner HMS Gaspee in Narragansett Bay, wounded its commander, and burned the ship. The attack was one of the earliest violent acts of colonial defiance against British rule in America. British attempts to identify and try the perpetrators failed, further inflaming tensions before the Revolution.
• 1772 Somerset v Stewart ruling English court holds chattel slavery unsupported by common law On 22 June 1772, Lord Mansfield ruled in the Court of King's Bench that no law in England positively sanctioned slavery, freeing the enslaved man James Somerset. The decision did not abolish slavery in the British Empire but became a foundational precedent cited by abolitionists for decades. News of the ruling spread widely among enslaved people and antislavery campaigners alike.
• 1772 Credit crisis of 1772 Collapse of the Ayr Bank triggers a British and European financial panic The Scottish bank Douglas, Heron and Company, known as the Ayr Bank, suspended payments on 25 June 1772 after reckless overexpansion of credit. The failure set off a wave of bankruptcies and bank runs across Britain, Amsterdam, and other European financial centers. The resulting liquidity crunch pushed the financially strained British East India Company toward the brink of collapse.