The Abolitionist Slave Trade Movement

This was a political reform movement during the 18th and 19th centuries often called the antislavery movement. It sought to end the enslavement of Africans and people of African descent in Europe, the Americas, and Africa itself. It also aimed to end the Atlantic slave trade carried out in the Atlantic Ocean between Africa, Europe, and the Americas. In Europe, Great Britain had the strongest abolitionist movement.

The British abolitionists, aware that their compatriots transported the greatest number of African slaves to the New World, concentrated their efforts against the slave trade rather than slavery itself, feeling that the termination of the trade would eventually lead to the end of the institution. The abolitionist attack was spearheaded by Granville Sharp* a humanitarian who in 1772 persuaded the British courts to declare that slavery could not exist in England. Sharp was chairman of the Committee of the Society, instituted in London in the Year 1787, for the purpose of effecting the abolition of the Slave-Trade.