Anti‐Slavery Movement, Britain

Abstract

The abolition of slavery in Britain and its Atlantic empire was a protracted process that took centuries to accomplish. While historians often focus on one element of the anti‐slavery movement – the abolition campaigns of the late eighteenth century – anti‐slavery resistance was, in fact, a much more complex phenomenon that ranged from slave resistance to evangelical pressure to mass boycotts and petitioning. The diversity of anti‐slavery resistance in the early modern period necessitates that scholars understand the end of slavery in Britain as the accomplishment of many grassroots movements rather than that of a single, monolithic organization of middling reformers.