Systems of coerced labour, racialisation, resistance and abolition across world history.
Slavery has taken varied forms across history, but all reduce people to coerced labour and restricted personhood. The Atlantic plantation system joined slavery to hereditary racial classification on an enormous scale.
Enslaved people resisted through family, culture, flight, work slowdowns, revolt and political action. Abolition was won through those struggles as well as organised campaigns and state conflict.
European traders, African political systems and American plantations forced more than twelve million Africans across the Atlantic. Mortality, violence and family separation continued after arrival.
Colonial laws made status hereditary and associated freedom with whiteness. Property rights protected enslavers while denying legal personhood to enslaved people.
Maroons, shipboard rebellions, everyday refusal and the Haitian Revolution exposed the instability of slavery. Testimony from formerly enslaved people shaped abolitionist campaigns.
Legal abolition occurred at different times and often protected enslavers' wealth. Apprenticeship, debt labour, segregation and colonial coercion limited freedom.
Archives foreground merchants and owners, but databases and community history recover names and lives. Debate about memorials and reparations connects past institutions to inherited wealth.
European colonies increasingly relied on enslaved African labour.
A national campaign against the slave trade formed.
Enslaved people destroyed plantation slavery and colonial rule.
The law ended British participation but not slavery.
Enslavers received compensation and apprenticeship delayed freedom.
Slavery was abolished except as criminal punishment.
The last American state ended legal slavery.
How did enslaved people make abolition possible?
Who was compensated after emancipation?
How can historians recover lives recorded as property?
Begin with the foundations, then move into the events, people and debates that add detail and complexity.
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