ABSTRACT
In March 1844, an English traveler in Morocco presented himself to the governor of Mogador. He announced that he was the agent of a society for promoting the abolition of "Slavery and the Slave Trade in Every Part of the World". England, with the most autonomous civil society in Europe, took the lead in developing an organized non-governmental challenge to both the Atlantic slave trade and its own colonial slave system, at the peak of their importance to the metropolitan economy. Western attitudes towards slavery in the Middle East were first forged during Britain's imperial expansion in India. While abolitionism was emerging in the West, Britain's expanding dominions in India were sustained by a contingent of administrative and military personnel amounting to no more than one European to a thousand indigenous subjects. Opponents of emancipation in India identified a final radical difference between slavery in the Western and Eastern hemispheres.
