The Anti Slavery Struggle

This is the story of a handful of men, led by Thomas Clarkson, who defied the slave trade and ignited the first great human rights movement. Beginning in 1788, a group of Abolitionists moved the cause of anti-slavery from the floor of Parliament to the homes of 300,000 people boycotting Caribbean sugar, and gave a platform to freed slaves.

“Traces the history of abolition from the 1600s to the 1860s . . . a valuable addition to our understanding of the role of race and racism in America.”—Florida Courier Received historical wisdom casts abolitionists as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Manisha Sinha overturns this image, broadening her scope beyond the antebellum period usually associated with abolitionism and recasting it as a radical social movement in which men and women, black and white, free and enslaved found common ground in causes ranging from feminism and utopian socialism to anti-imperialism and efforts to defend the rights of labor. Drawing on extensive archival research, including newly discovered letters and pamphlets, Sinha documents the influence of the Haitian Revolution and the centrality of slave resistance in shaping the ideology and tactics of abolition. This book is a comprehensive history of the abolition movement in a transnational context. It illustrates how the abolitionist vision ultimately linked the slave’s cause to the struggle to redefine American democracy and human rights across the globe. “A full history of the men and women who truly made us free.”—Ira Berlin, The New York Times Book Review “A stunning new history of abolitionism . . . [Sinha] plugs abolitionism back into the history of anticapitalist protest.”—The Atlantic “Will deservedly take its place alongside the equally magisterial works of Ira Berlin on slavery and Eric Foner on the Reconstruction Era.”—The Wall Street Journal “A powerfully unfamiliar look at the struggle to end slavery in the United States . . . as multifaceted as the movement it chronicles.”—The Boston Globe

Ending Slavery broadens the scope of the anti-slavery struggle beyond the national and domestic narrative to draw a map of a new transnational and differentiated geography of abolitionism. It aims at complicating our understanding of the antislavery struggle by offering an opportunity to rethink the relationship between the personal and the political in the antebellum period. Focusing on the post-1830 period, Ending Slavery also presents a new and ambitious periodization by extending its historical breadth, through Reconstruction, well into the present to examine contemporary representations and interpretations of the history of abolitionism. The book puts forward not only a reflection on the historiographical and memorial legacies of antislavery activity in the United States, but it also interrogates how this activism partook and still partakes in the long Civil Rights Movement for full social and political equality for African Americans. A collective enterprise that taps into and builds on recent research, the volume brings together historians and African-Americanists, a majority of whom are based in Europe. It ambitions to be a contribution that expands discussions and opens perspectives on the history of abolitionism. Suitable for general readers, students and scholars, Ending Slavery will serve as a useful resource in the area of slavery and Atlantic studies.