Accounts of the Age of the Atlantic Revolution generally identify Britain as the nation that lost the War of American independence but thereafter escaped both revolutionary change at home and overseas. Yet, over the half century after 1788 the British Parliament first outlawed what was then the largest slave trading business in the Atlantic world and then became the first imperial power to abolish slavery throughout its transatlantic possessions. In a pioneering exercise of civil society mobilization, the British created waves of demands for the ending of its slave trade and then its transatlantic slave colonies. This phenomenon has also been recently identified as the emergence of “the modern social movement.” Decade after decade the British government became the major agent in the creation of international sanctions against the slave trade. Its example inspired and encouraged similar, if usually less successful, civil society initiatives in Europe and the Americas. At home it formed a model for the expansion of popular participation for other social reforms, by many groups previously excluded from the public arena.

By the beginning of the second quarter of the nineteenth century, “free soil” no longer stopped at the Atlantic edge of Europe. The world's most powerful economic and naval power had launched a policy to interdict the Old World supply of slave labor. The great powers of Europe and their newly separated states had all assented, if often insincerely, to prohibiting slave trading from or to their shores. A partial network of treaties provided the basis for the seizure of slave ships and the disposition of the captives in various enclaves in Africa and the Americas.

Despite all this, antiabolitionist skeptics still appeared to have correctly assessed the limits of the project. The volume of the transatlantic slave trade between 1826 and 1850 diminished by only 5 percent. In the New World the institution appeared never to be more vibrant. By 1850, there were probably five and a half million slaves in the Americas, more than at any point in the history of the Americas. In the world of Afro-Asia, there were probably more than three times that number of slaves, not counting varieties of bound laborers in Eastern Europe and concubines, who were still more numerous in parts of the Eastern hemisphere.

In terms of tropical production, the combined impact of British abolitionism on the Atlantic slave trade, revolutionary emancipation in the French colonies, and legislated emancipation in the British colonies, altered the distribution of slave-produced cash crops in the West Indies.

In March 1844, an English traveler in Morocco presented himself to the governor of Magador. James Richardson announced that he was the agent of a “Society” for promoting “the Abolition of Slavery and the Slave Trade in Every Part of the World.” His mission was to petition the Emperor of Morocco to join all men in all parts of the world in abolishing a traffic “contrary to the rights of Men and the Laws of God.” The governor replied that Richardson's mission was “against our religion; I cannot entertain it, think of it or interfere with it in any way whatever.” The purchase and sale of slaves was authorized by the Prophet himself. If the governor were even to accept the petition, he told Richardson, the Sultan, he claimed, would order the governor's “toungue to be cut from my mouth.” Moreover, recorded the Englishman, were the Moroccan Emperor to agree with the Society and abolish the traffic in slavery throughout his dominions, all the people would rise in revolt against him and the Emperor would be the first to have his head cut off. The governor, he concluded, “politely declined to receive the petition.”

In March 1844, the governor of Magador was not alone in refusing to receive petitions requesting the abolition of the slave trade or slavery. In 1840, the U.S. House of Representatives, after years of vituperative debate, enacted a rule prohibiting that body “from receiving, much less considering, antislavery petitions.”