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.