Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

52 results

Page 1 of 3

  • 15 - Revolution in England? Abolitionism

  • from Part II - Western, Central, and Eastern Europe
  • General editor Wim Klooster, Clark University, Massachusetts
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions
    Published online:
    18 October 2023
    Print publication:
    09 November 2023, pp 396-420

  • Summary

    Accounts of the Age of the Atlantic Revolution generally identify Britain as the nation that lost the War of American independence but thereafter escaped both revolutionary change at home and overseas. Yet, over the half century after 1788 the British Parliament first outlawed what was then the largest slave trading business in the Atlantic world and then became the first imperial power to abolish slavery throughout its transatlantic possessions. In a pioneering exercise of civil society mobilization, the British created waves of demands for the ending of its slave trade and then its transatlantic slave colonies. This phenomenon has also been recently identified as the emergence of “the modern social movement.” Decade after decade the British government became the major agent in the creation of international sanctions against the slave trade. Its example inspired and encouraged similar, if usually less successful, civil society initiatives in Europe and the Americas. At home it formed a model for the expansion of popular participation for other social reforms, by many groups previously excluded from the public arena.

The Cambridge World History of Slavery
  • Volume 4, AD 1804–AD 2016
  • Edited by David Eltis, Stanley L. Engerman, Seymour Drescher, David Richardson
  • Published online:
    20 April 2017
    Print publication:
    24 April 2017
  • Slavery and coerced labor have been among the most ubiquitous of human institutions both in time - from ancient times to the present - and in place, having existed in virtually all geographic areas and societies. This volume covers the period from the independence of Haiti to modern perceptions of slavery by assembling twenty-eight original essays, each written by scholars acknowledged as leaders in their respective fields. Issues discussed include the sources of slaves, the slave trade, the social and economic functioning of slave societies, the responses of slaves to enslavement, efforts to abolish slavery continuing to the present day, the flow of contract labor and other forms of labor control in the aftermath of abolition, and the various forms of coerced labor that emerged in the twentieth century under totalitarian regimes and colonialism.

Abolition
  • A History of Slavery and Antislavery
  • Seymour Drescher
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    27 July 2009
  • In one form or another, slavery has existed throughout the world for millennia. It helped to change the world, and the world transformed the institution. In the 1450s, when Europeans from the small corner of the globe least enmeshed in the institution first interacted with peoples of other continents, they created, in the Americas, the most dynamic, productive, and exploitative system of coerced labor in human history. Three centuries later these same intercontinental actions produced a movement that successfully challenged the institution at the peak of its dynamism. Within another century a new surge of European expansion constructed Old World empires under the banner of antislavery. However, twentieth-century Europe itself was inundated by a new system of slavery, larger and more deadly than its earlier system of New World slavery. This book examines these dramatic expansions and contractions of the institution of slavery and the impact of violence, economics, and civil society in the ebb and flow of slavery and antislavery during the last five centuries.

  • 9 - British Emancipation

  • Seymour Drescher, University of Pittsburgh
  • Book:
    Abolition
    Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    27 July 2009, pp 245-266

  • Summary

    By the beginning of the second quarter of the nineteenth century, “free soil” no longer stopped at the Atlantic edge of Europe. The world's most powerful economic and naval power had launched a policy to interdict the Old World supply of slave labor. The great powers of Europe and their newly separated states had all assented, if often insincerely, to prohibiting slave trading from or to their shores. A partial network of treaties provided the basis for the seizure of slave ships and the disposition of the captives in various enclaves in Africa and the Americas.

    Despite all this, antiabolitionist skeptics still appeared to have correctly assessed the limits of the project. The volume of the transatlantic slave trade between 1826 and 1850 diminished by only 5 percent. In the New World the institution appeared never to be more vibrant. By 1850, there were probably five and a half million slaves in the Americas, more than at any point in the history of the Americas. In the world of Afro-Asia, there were probably more than three times that number of slaves, not counting varieties of bound laborers in Eastern Europe and concubines, who were still more numerous in parts of the Eastern hemisphere.

    In terms of tropical production, the combined impact of British abolitionism on the Atlantic slave trade, revolutionary emancipation in the French colonies, and legislated emancipation in the British colonies, altered the distribution of slave-produced cash crops in the West Indies.

Page 1 of 3