The organized campaign to end the transatlantic slave trade and slavery itself, spanning roughly a century from the 1780s through Brazilian emancipation in 1888 — a movement that drew on Quaker organizing, Black resistance and testimony, Enlightenment philosophy, and evangelical Christianity to produce what was called at the time the first great international human rights campaign.
Slavery had existed in every human civilization for thousands of years. Within a century, a movement emerged that convinced most of the world’s major powers to outlaw it. How that happened — who drove it, who resisted it, and what it actually achieved — is one of the most contested stories in modern history.