Definition
Abolition was the movement to outlaw slavery and the trade in enslaved people. It united enslaved and formerly enslaved people, religious reformers, writers, and politicians around the conviction that holding human beings as property was a moral wrong that no economy or tradition could justify.
The movement gathered force in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Britain banned the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 and slavery in its empire in 1833. The United States ended slavery in 1865 after a civil war, and Brazil, the last major slaveholding nation in the Americas, abolished it in 1888.
Why it matters
How it works
A movement to abolish an entrenched institution must change both law and public opinion. Abolitionists used personal accounts of the enslaved to make distant suffering vivid, organised petitions and boycotts to apply political pressure, and built alliances across nations and faiths. Resistance by the enslaved themselves — uprisings, escapes, and the example of free Haiti — made slavery costlier and harder to defend. Where persuasion failed, abolition came only through force, as in the American Civil War.