The late eighteenth century was a period of intense economic, social and political change. Improvement in communications allowed for the transfer of people and ideas on an unprecedented level. This development gave rise to some paradoxes: as enlightenment ideas spread and were consolidated by the revolutions in America and France, so too did the enslavement of people, most notably through the transatlantic slave trade. This situation was responsible for one of the most popular and international humanitarian movements of the period: anti-slavery. Britain, which had used slavery to consolidate the success of its empire, was also the centre of successive anti-slavery movements. Nor was Ireland immune from the changing political climate, embracing both political radicalism and anti-slavery ideals. Britain had been involved in the slave trade since the sixteenth century and by the eighteenth century had become the dominant European country involved in the ‘middle passage’, that is, the harrowing journey from Africa to the West Indies. By the 1780s, as the revolutionary tide spread across the Atlantic, British radicals increasingly likened their own situation to that of slaves. In this way, according to the historian J. R. Oldfield, ‘slavery began to take on a more immediate significance, related to the political condition of thousands of native-born Britons’.

The early slavery movements were led by nonconformist groups in Britain and Ireland. The Anglican Church hierarchy had a more ambivalent attitude, viewing abolition as interfering with the rights of property and, more calculating, fearing it would affect their tithe income.