ABSTRACT
The campaign to end the slave trade and slavery has puzzled historians perhaps more than any other aspect of the history of slavery. For centuries, the Atlantic slave trade had grown and thrived with very little intellectual or economic opposition, yet by the end of the eighteenth century, powerful abolitionist groups and movements had taken root on both sides of the English-speaking Atlantic. The origins of anti-slavery were complex and international, drawing upon ideas from the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions and finding sustenance in the transformation of the world of dissent in the eighteenth century. Despite the pioneering efforts of American abolitionists, the centre of abolitionist sentiment and organization was Britain. In the early nineteenth century, British abolitionism became the engine behind the drive to abolish slavery worldwide. Indeed, global abolition became a distinctively British passion throughout the nineteenth century, yet this in itself is a historical curiosity, because in the course of the eighteenth century the British had become the greatest slave traders in the Atlantic: a century later, they prided themselves on their abolitionist credentials.
