ABSTRACT
Abolition was part of Britain's unchallenged status at the center of the movement to eliminate slavery from the world. This chapter emphasizes the relation of British abolitionism to imperialism from about the 1780s to the 1870s, when the most salient objective of British abolitionism beyond its own empire was the ending of the transoceanic slave trade. Despite the emergence of popular abolitionism in 1882 the British government viewed the outbreak of war with France in 1793 as yet another opportunity to expand its slave empire in the Caribbean in order to add to Britain's commercial and naval supremacy. Decade after decade the British government hobbled the imperial growth of its slave empire, in full awareness of the consequences of abolitionist policies. Nonabolitionists were equally unimpressed by the proposal. Britain's intellectual elite had no qualms about predicting the experiment's imminent failure on scientific grounds.
