Abolitionism

Abolitionism is the movement to end slavery, the slave trade, and related forms of legally or socially enforced unfreedom. It has included religious protest, enslaved people's resistance, litigation, petitions, journalism, diplomacy, military action, revolutionary politics, parliamentary legislation, and international law.

Abolitionism should not be treated as a single event or as a movement that appeared in only one society. Early antislavery arguments often challenged wrongful enslavement, slave trading, or particular abuses before they became universal claims against slavery as an institution. In the Atlantic world, abolitionism drew strength from Black testimony, slave resistance, Quaker and evangelical organizing, free Black activism, revolutionary politics, and parliamentary campaigns. In Africa, the Islamic world, and the Indian Ocean, abolition also moved through local moral critique, treaty pressure, state reform, colonial law, and the actions of enslaved people who fled or used new legal openings.

Abolition usually occurred in layers. A government might prohibit slave importation or sale before ending legal slave status; it might abolish legal title while preserving apprenticeship, household dependency, contract labor, or other coercive arrangements. Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, with emancipation in most British colonies beginning in 1834.^[1] The United States abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime, through the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in 1865.^[2]

The sequence was different elsewhere. Tunisia abolished slavery in 1846 after earlier reforms closed markets and removed state taxes on slave sales.^[3] In Zanzibar, British treaty pressure closed public slave markets and prohibited export in 1873, but legal slave status ended later and concubines were not fully included until 1909. Such examples show why historians distinguish between abolition of the trade, abolition of legal slave status, emancipation in practice, and later criminalization.

Twentieth-century abolitionism increasingly became an international legal project. The 1926 Slavery Convention required states to suppress the slave trade and move toward the complete abolition of slavery.^[4] Later instruments addressed servitude, forced labor, trafficking, debt bondage, forced marriage, and other slavery-like practices.

Legal abolition did not by itself end coercive labor, inherited stigma, racial hierarchy, penal exploitation, debt bondage, domestic servitude, or trafficking. For that reason, abolitionism is best understood both as the historical campaign against legal slavery and as a continuing effort to make exit from coercive control practically possible.