The abolition of slavery
A moral campaign, slave resistance and economic change end legal slavery across the Atlantic world.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 81 years
- Known to
- ± 1 year
- Era
- Industrial, Holocene
Britain abolishes the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in its colonies in 1833, compensating slave owners rather than the enslaved — a debt Britain finished paying in 2015. The United States abolishes it in 1865 after a civil war, Brazil last in 1888. Abolition owes as much to sustained resistance and revolt by enslaved people, above all Haiti, as to metropolitan campaigning, and forced labour continued in other legal forms.