A Global History of Anti-Slavery Politics in the Nineteenth Century

Over the course of the nineteenth century, European and American attitudes to slavery underwent a transformation. Slavery, thriving and morally acceptable on the eve of the American and French revolutions, was considered 'uncivilized' and 'barbaric' by 1900. This transformation is one of the most significant moral revolutions in human history. This book shows how the anti-slavery movement became a central aspect of international relations in the nineteenth century. Abolitionism provided an issue that connected high politics, popular associations, and the agency of the most oppressed individuals, in changing social institutions, labour, economic and commercial relations, and international politics. The story of the exchange of these ideas across borders, the establishment of transnational networks, and the global legacy of anti-slavery for human rights and humanitarian politics today are the subjects of this collection of essays.

William Mulligan is a Lecturer in Modern History at University College Dublin, Ireland. He has written widely on international history, his most recent book being The Origins of the First World War (2010).

Maurice Bric is Associate Professor of History at University College Dublin, Ireland. He has written extensively on the history of the Atlantic world during the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His book, Ireland, Philadelphia and the Re-Invention of America, 1760-1800 (2008), was awarded the Irish Historical Research Prize in 2009.