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Olaudah Equiano was an outstanding 18th-century African of Igbo descent. He wrote and published a memoir that documented his life in Africa before enslavement, his life as a slave, his life in freedom, and his life as a writer and abolitionist. By his account, he was born in 1745 in Essaka (Isseke) in what is known as the Anambra State in southeastern Nigeria. Olaudah’s life took a tragic and dramatic turn when he was about eleven years old. He was kidnapped with his sister by slave raiders during the peak of the transatlantic slave trade in the Bight of Biafra in present-day Nigeria. After being sold to European slave traders, he worked as a slave in America and the Caribbean Islands and was later transferred to England, where he bought his freedom. His memoir and advocacy as an abolitionist brought him in contact with other abolitionists in England, where he was destined to play a critical role in the ending of the slave trade. Equiano and his memoir are significant in additional ways. Apart from the uncertainty about his early years, his autobiography provides one of the earliest depictions of the middle passage experience of enslaved Africans and the nature of Igbo society in the 18th century. His description of the political economy of the Igbo and the social organization of the society provides contemporary scholars with an early account of an African society.

Historiography has traditionally divided the policy of introducing enslaved people to Spanish America into three periods based on the legal framework in effect at the time. These divisions are: the period of licensing from 1493 to 1595; the period of asientos from 1595 to 1789: and the period of free trade in enslaved people from 1789 to 1812. However, Spanish enslaved traffic did not end in 1812; it remained for decades thereafter, with the main destinations being Cuba and Puerto Rico. Spanish colonial expeditions to the Americas included enslaved Black people from the outset. The Instructions to Comendador Fray Nicolás de Ovando, published in 1501, contain the earliest reference to Black slavery in the West Indies. Supply was seen as an increasingly important problem as demand grew. Systematic mechanisms were needed to ensure a regular supply of enslaved people. The joining of the Portuguese and Spanish crowns under Phillip II, known as the Iberian Union (1580–1640), seemed to solve the problem of supplying enslaved labor to Spanish possessions throughout the world. The Rio de la Plata played an important role in the extensive route linking Angola to Potosí, which, together with its hinterland, constituted a rich market made enormously attractive by the silver mined from the mountain for which the city was named. The lure of Peruvian silver hung over the slave trade and the institution of slavery in the Rio de la Plata region throughout the entire slaveholding period. During the 1789–1812 period, local merchants and traders in leather, tallow, and timber vied for position in this profitable market.

Brazil was the last Western country to abolish slavery, which it did in 1888. As a colonial institution, slavery was present in all regions and in almost all free and freed strata of the population. Emancipation only became an issue in the political sphere when it was raised by the imperial government in the second half of the decade of the 1860s, after the defeat of the Confederacy in the US Civil War and during the war against Paraguay. In 1871, new legislation, despite the initial opposition from slave owners and their political representatives, set up a process of gradual emancipation. By the end of the century, slavery would have disappeared, or would have become residual, without major disruptions to the economy or the land property regime. By the end of the 1870s, however, popular opposition to slavery, demanding its immediate abolition without any kind of compensation to former slave owners, grew in parliament and as a mass movement. Abolitionist organizations spread across the country during the first half of the 1880s. Stimulated by the direct actions of some of these abolitionist organizations, resistance to slavery intensified and became increasingly a struggle against slavery itself and not only for individual or collective freedom. Incapable of controlling the situation, the imperial government finally passed a law in parliament granting immediate and unconditional abolition on May 13, 1888.

Court cases and other forms of legal evidence, including registers of slave liberation, provide some of the best evidence there is regarding slaves during and after the end of slavery. This article examines various colonial courts from the Portuguese Inquisition courts to the registers of slaves seeking certificates of freedom. Changes in legal institutions and antislavery policies shaped the conditions in which slaves and freed people came before legal authorities. However, the evidence of slave’s and freed people’s voices read in court and legal documents has been shaped by the procedures that prevailed in these various legal fora and by the multiple translations of oral testimony into written texts.

Prison abolition as an American movement, strategy, and theory has existed since the establishment of prison as the primary mode of punishment. In many of its forms, it is an extension of abolition movements dating back to the inception of slavery. The long-term goal of prison abolition is for all people to live in a safe, liberated, and free world. In practice, prison abolition values healing and accountability, suggesting an entirely different way of living and maintaining relationships outside of oppressive regimes, including that of the prison. Prison abolition is concerned with the dismantling of the prison–industrial complex and other oppressive institutions and structures, which restrict true liberation of people who have been marginalized by those in power. These structures include white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and ablest and heteronormative ideologies. The origins of the prison regime are both global and rooted in history with two fundamental strategies of dominance, the captivity of African-descended peoples, and the conquest of Indigenous and Aboriginal peoples, land and resource. Similarly, the origins of prison abolition begin with the resistance of these systems of dominance. The contemporary prison abolition movement, today, is traced to the Attica Prison Uprising in 1971 when incarcerated people in the New York prison rebelled and demanded change in the living conditions inside prison. The nature of the uprising was different from prior efforts, insofar as the organizers’ demands were about fundamental rights, not merely reforms. Throughout the history of abolition work, there is continuous division between reform and abolition organizers. When the lives, voices, and leadership of the people most impacted by the violence of these oppressive regimes is centered, there is minimal space for discussion of reform. Throughout the abolition movement in America, and other western cultures, the leadership of Black, Indigenous, women, and gender-nonconforming people of color play a pivotal role. By centering the experiences of those most vulnerable, abolitionists understand prison does not need to be reformed and is critical of fashionable reforms and alternatives to prisons which are still rooted in carceral logic.

The Scandinavian countries established overseas settlements in Africa and the Americas, starting in the 17th century. In Africa, trading stations were initially established with the consent of local rulers. The Danish trading stations on the Gold Coast developed in time into a more formal colony. In the Americas, Scandinavian settlements were of various natures, including the short-lived settlement colony of New Sweden and slavery-based plantation societies in the Caribbean. The Caribbean colonies would bear resemblance to many other Caribbean plantation economies of the time. The Scandinavian countries also participated in the transatlantic slave trade: while these countries might have been responsible for a quite small share of the total transatlantic slave trade, the trade was large compared to the size of the domestic population in these countries. The formal abolition of the slave trade, and later of slavery, in the Scandinavian colonies made the colonial possessions unimportant or even burdens for the Scandinavian states, so that the colonies eventually were sold to other European nations.

Eunuchs, castrated male slaves, were employed at the courts of kingdoms and empires throughout Africa north of the equator. While the practice may have started as early as the 6th century bce, it became widespread during the medieval and early modern eras. Eunuchs were part of palace culture in both East and West Africa and in both Muslim and animist polities. Ethiopia was a notable exception to this rule; there, uncastrated male servants held posts that in other polities were filled by eunuchs. The transportation and castration of African eunuchs formed part of a much larger trade in African slaves along overland caravan routes and through the Red Sea. A shifting collection of castration centers existed across supraequatorial Africa. In East Africa, Upper Egypt was a key center; in Central and West Africa, Bagirmi became a center in the 18th century. Court eunuchs performed an array of roles, notably those of gatekeepers and companions to the ruler, harem guardians, and supervisors of the palace treasury. Particularly in West Africa, they also took on military duties. African eunuchs were also widely employed at imperial courts outside Africa, particularly in the Near East and South Asia. Beginning in the 12th century ce, a corps of mostly African eunuchs also guarded the Prophet Muhammad’s tomb in Medina and the Kaʿba in Mecca. Sporadic attempts to abolish the trade in eunuchs and their employment were unsuccessful before the British-led abolition movement of the 19th century. Even so, African eunuchs continued to serve in several West African kingdoms and in the Ottoman Empire until the early 20th century.

Madagascar, the fourth largest island in the world, was first permanently settled in about the mid-9th century. Slavery was present on the island from the first, but a slave export trade became significant only from the mid-18th century because of demand from the French islands of Réunion and Mauritius. Most of the literature has focused on slavery in, and the slave trades involving, Imerina, until 1817 a landlocked kingdom in the central highlands of Madagascar. In 1820, Radama I of Imerina signed a treaty with the British in which he banned the slave export trade. However, the measure was effective only in Merina-controlled regions of the island, and the traffic in slaves, predominantly to the French islands of the western Indian Ocean, continued, albeit in clandestine form. Moreover, the 1820 ban applied only to exports, and there arose a lively trade in imported East African slaves. At the same time, Merina military expansion resulted in the enslavement of thousands of non-Merina Malagasy women and children. Of greater significance than slavery was forced labor. In pre-colonial times, fanompoana, or unremunerated forced labor for the Merina crown, was originally an honorary service of limited duration. However, from 1820, it was applied on such a scale that it resulted in the impoverishment of the vast bulk of ordinary people subjected to Merina authority. In 1896, following the French takeover of the island, the colonial regime decreed the abolition of slavery but maintained a system of corvée labor as exploitative as pre-colonial fanompoana. Many former slaves chose to remain in servitude to their former masters rather than become subject to corvées, which also underlay a massive revolt that erupted in 1947 in the coffee-growing regions of the eastern littoral, foreshadowing the demise of French colonial rule. In the post-independence era, a forced labor regime for youths was reinstituted from 1978 to 1990, while descendants of ex-slaves have largely retained their servile status, and many have remained socially and economically marginalized.

African slaves played significant roles in the history of the Persian Gulf from at least the 9th century onward, during which period the social, political, and economic significance of African slaves saw a number of changes. For example, the 9th-century Abbasid Caliphate was greatly disturbed by the Zanj Revolt (869–883) in which African slaves took a major part; European travelers in the 17th and 18th centuries frequently noted African eunuchs at royal courts and saw African slave soldiers there, while in the 19th and the early 20th centuries, the production of global commodities linking the Persian Gulf with the rest of the world, such as dates and pearls, relied heavily on the labor of enslaved Africans. The historical records are enough to show that most such slaves were shipped to the Persian Gulf from either the East Coast or the Horn of Africa, while genetic studies reveal the significance of West African haplotypes in the population of certain regions of the Persian Gulf. While the flow of African slaves continued until the beginning of the 20th century, there were two peaks, one in the 9th century and the other a thousand years later in the 19th century. The earlier peak was triggered by the demand for labor in lower Iraq during the Abbasid era but had ended by the time of the Zanj Revolt. The second peak was prompted by global demand for dates and pearls and continued until international solidarity developed against the slave trade, which by the beginning of the 20th century had succeeded in blocking the flow of slaves from Africa into the Persian Gulf. Naturally enough, however, even after imports of slaves from Africa had been stopped, slave demand did not cease and slave trade within the Persian Gulf continued. A number of those traded were descendants of Africans notably of individuals traded from Baluchistan to the Arabian side of the Gulf. Eventually, slavery in the Persian Gulf more or less collapsed during the first half of the 20th century, not as a result of international pressure but because of declines in the date and pearl industries.

Slavery and the trade in slaves are deeply rooted in the economic and cultural history of the Ethiopian–Eritrean region. Various polities and societies across the Christian, Semitic languages-speaking highlands, the Rift Valley, and its surrounding lowland regions—bordered by the Nile Valley on the west and the Red Sea coast to the east—engaged in practices of human bondage and trade. These societies practiced manumission culturally, while the legal abolition of slavery and the slave trade were lengthy processes lasting many decades. Abolitionism, as a political process, was influenced by domestic and international political bargaining among regional polities and Western imperial interests. As the leading force of abolition in the 19th century, Britain took relatively late interest in Ethiopia. British abolitionism emerged in the region in order to support colonial and imperial aspirations, which were attached to commercial treaties. Abolition thus looked like a Western import and is still often discussed from a singular Western perspective. The uneven production of knowledge by travelers, diplomats, or the British Anti-Slavery Society amplified the Western abolitionist ideologies and overshadowed the contemporary Ethiopian discourse on abolition. The abolition of slavery became a major bone of contention in Ethiopia’s attempt to become a member of the League of Nations in the 1920s. Eventually, it became a matter of state survival in the standoff between Ethiopia and the threat of an invasion by Italy, which used slavery as a pretext to justify its violent occupation. Despite a long period of abolitionist efforts, slavery died a slow death in Ethiopia and has left a durable imprint on the local societies. Emancipation was never achieved throughout Ethiopia. In some areas, people of slave descent suffer from exclusion and marginalization until the early 21st century.

Efforts to mitigate slavery in Africa were multidimensional. Many drew upon Christian discourses and institutions, yet fully assessing Christian antislavery in Africa raises complex moral and historical questions. Christian abolitionism inspired missionaries throughout Africa and the diaspora, helped generate support for Christian missions, advanced global treaties that made slavery illegal, and profoundly shaped 20th- and 21st-century African Christianity, including through the evangelization of slaves, some of whom became famous abolitionists themselves. Antislavery appealed to humanitarian instincts among Christian missionaries, their benefactors, and European populations, and it undoubtedly alleviated some suffering. Notwithstanding the benevolence in such motivations, racialized paternalism was also in operation. Moreover, like slavery for export, antislavery altered African political economies, sometimes abruptly, helping some Africans and disempowering others. It also legitimated eventual colonial rule in Africa, since depictions of a vulnerable, slave-ridden continent implicitly defended European intervention as an urgent humanitarian undertaking. Europeans also applied antislavery unevenly in Africa due to their own self-interests, often, for example, delaying emancipation (legally ending all slavery) because it threatened labor systems deemed vital for colonial order and economies. Christian antislavery impulses and actions, whether to stop the slave trade or in pursuit of legal abolition, thus resist generalization and do not allow easy self-congratulation for either defenders of European colonization or Christians, African or non-African.

Post-slavery is an academic analytical concept that signifies the fragmented legacies and continuities of past slavery and slave trade in contemporary societies after its formal legal abolition, and beyond emancipation processes. Legacies can take the form of discourses based in collective memories and ideologies of past slavery, while continuities can take the shape of continued relations of social hierarchy and dependency between people of slave descent and the descendants of slaveholders and other people of free descent, to the disadvantage of the formerly enslaved and their descendants. The social mechanisms of exclusion that uphold post-slavery situations include the invisibility of such situations to outsiders; structural racism and other forms of stigmatization; struggles surrounding gender relations; the social importance of genealogy, marriage, and family formation across the historical free-unfree divide; uneven access to physical and social capital, such as land and positions of authority; and the politics of history and memory. Post-slavery legacies and continuities form points on a continuum, ranging from explicit forms of exploitation that could qualify as slavery outside the law (de facto, but not de jure slavery), via structural racism and other forms of structural exclusion in society (post-slavery continuities), to the residual histories and memories that can continue to mark differences between the descendants of slave and free today (post-slavery legacies).

Across West Africa up to the 19th century, titled positions for women ensured that women’s interests could be voiced and their disputes regulated. Women often had major roles as brokers and intermediaries in trade centers along the Saharan and Atlantic littorals, contributing to the emergence of powerful Euro-African families. Nevertheless, women were particularly vulnerable to the depredations of the trans-Saharan and Atlantic slave trades. Because female labor was so highly valued, female slaves were more expensive than male slaves. The history of women in West Africa has been characterized by marked differences by ecological zone. Those differences have been deepened by Islamic influences in the North and by different experiences under French, British, and Portuguese rule. With the decline in the Atlantic trade and the growing emphasis upon commodity production, the demand for female labor in agriculture and in processing rose. Under colonial rule, the loss of slave labor was partially offset by increasing demands upon the labor of wives. Women mediated demands upon their labor through colonial courts, with some success in the early decades of the 20th century. Later courts and administrators supported patriarchal controls upon women in the interests of order and a smoothly running economy. Women’s control over their traditional means of accumulating wealth through farming, cloth production, and specialized crafts was typically undermined as economies shifted to emphasize cash crop production and tree crops in particular. Women nevertheless could flourish in market trade and could sometimes gain control over new niches in the economy. The growth of colonial infrastructure had contradictory implications. Women’s traditionally important roles as queens, priestesses, and ritual specialists declined in importance. At the same time, schooling gave some women access to new means of gaining income and prestige as teachers and medical practitioners.

Between 1441 and 1444, Portuguese navigators exploring the west coast of Africa captured the first contingents of Africans on the Mauritanian coast and subsequently shipped them to Portugal. Most of them were Muslim Berbers, but there were also individuals among them from sub-Saharan Africa who had been brought to the Barbary Coast by way of the caravan routes. These first slave-raiding expeditions fueled a plan to divert one of the trans-Saharan routes to the coast, which the Portuguese successfully accomplished when trade relations with the Berbers became regular. They built a fortified outpost in the Bay of Arguin, in Mauritania, from where several thousand slaves were sent to Europe between 1448 and the early 16th century. In the meantime, the Portuguese had continued to advance down the coast of Africa and had established commercial relations with the local authorities and merchants in sub-Saharan Africa who were inclined to sell captives, as was the case of the Wolof people in the Senegambia region. The Portuguese monarchy secured monopoly over the slave trade along the African coast with the promulgation of the Papal Bulls (1452–1456). They gave the Portuguese crown authorization to raid and trade exclusively, unlike other European powers that did not enjoy the same privilege. One of King João II of Portugal’s (1481–1495) projects was to establish several trading posts along the African coast, following the example of the fort of Arguin, intended for the trade of slaves. However, this project proved unsuccessful, whereupon the archipelagos of Cabo Verde and São Tomé and Principe assumed a prominent role as entrepot in the trade between Africa and Europe. When the Spanish king authorized a direct connection between the markets of Africa and Central America from 1518 onward, the Cabo Verde and São Tomé islands became the main suppliers of captive labor for the New World throughout most of the 16th century. In the early 17th century, the already very vulnerable Portuguese monopoly collapsed, and the other European monarchies began to compete directly with the Portuguese in the transatlantic trade of human beings. Portuguese slave traders, who had previously preferred the ports between the Senegal River and the Bight of Biafra for captive acquisition during the 17th and 18th centuries, turned their attention to West Central Africa, mainly to what became known as Angola. A bilateral and direct route was established between the port of Luanda (and later, Benguela) and Brazil, to where approximately 10,000 enslaved people were sent every year. After the second half of the 18th century, East African markets also began to supply enslaved Africans to the transatlantic trade. Whereas in Northern Europe, abolitionist movements had been gaining momentum by the turn of the 19th century, both Portugal and Brazil (which became independent in 1822) resisted ending their involvement on the slave trade. Several laws were promulgated during the early 19th century; however, a total ban on the slave trade was only achieved after a series of laws enacted in Portugal between 1836 and 1842 and in Brazil in 1850. Until then, partial restrictions had little effect, resulting only in an intensification of the very lucrative clandestine slave trade.

Since the last quarter of the 18th century, the suppression of the transoceanic slave trade had been under way. A popular movement became active in Britain, while a number of US states abolished the trade in the last quarter of the 18th century. Denmark abolished the trade completely in 1803, Britain in 1807, and the United States in 1808. After the Congress of Vienna, the British took the initiative in creating a network of bilateral and multilateral treaties to legalize naval suppression of the slave trade in the Atlantic, and, accordingly, Britain, the United States, France, and Portugal stationed naval squadrons off the African coast. From the 1840s onwards, another network to suppress slave supply was formed with African rulers, those agreements providing in some cases both justification and the practical basis for European territorial expansion in Atlantic Africa. The Europeans’ antislave-trade activity caused the Atlantic African economy to shift toward so-called legitimate commerce, and, since the 1960s, evaluation of that economic transition has been at the core of debate among historians of West Africa. In the 1810s in the Indian Ocean, similar progress toward suppression of the slave trade took place almost simultaneously with that of its Atlantic counterpart, although progress was much quicker in the Atlantic. In fact, the suppression campaign in the Indian Ocean, which began with various treaties concluded by the British with local polities, gathered full force only from the 1860s. Interestingly, in Indian Ocean Africa the relationship between the suppression of the slave trade and imperial territorial occupation was more distant than on Africa’s Atlantic rim. The suppression of the transoceanic slave trade cannot be understood without a multifaceted perspective, because this subject is connected to and so must be integrated with various fields, including naval, political, economic, legal, and social history. The transoceanic slave trade must therefore be located within a much wider context.

The prominence of religious groups, religious motifs, and religious and theological claims in the anti-trafficking movement is useful for exploring how social movements are shaped by religious actors and claims and, in turn, use religion in the process of creating social change. The anti-trafficking movement can be situated in relation to three key previous social movements: the 18th–19th-century abolition movement that sought to abolish chattel slavery, the 19th–20th-century anti-white slavery campaigns of the social purity movement that sought to eliminate prostitution, and the late 20th-century movement that sought to address Christian persecution through promoting religious freedom. By highlighting the way that the anti-trafficking movement draws on and extends the moral claim-making of each of these social movements, these earlier movements are revealed as shaping the social movement ecology out of which the contemporary anti-trafficking movement emerges and in which it functions. Further, exploring the movement to end human trafficking in relation to these social movements suggests at least three significant ways religion matters in social movements: as a source of moral legitimacy, as a source of moral clarity, and as a cultural resource. As a source of moral authority, religion provides a source of grounding that lends credibility to movements’ moral claims by situating them in something larger than immediate interests and experiences. As a source of moral clarity, religion is a source of the moral values that animates social movements and sustains them through challenges. As a cultural resource, religious sensibilities influence how social movements perceive issues and formulate responses to them.

Apart from a few dissenting perspectives, social workers have not coherently engaged with the moral dilemmas inherent in the profession’s participation in coercing or mandating patients to mental health treatment. With roots in the development of asylums in 1400s Western Europe, involuntary mental health services continue to rely on processes involving the state in order to detain individuals who are deemed severely mentally ill. Legal precedent and practices in the United States as they pertain to involuntary mental health treatment reflect tensions about promoting individual freedom while maintaining safety. Given the diversity of circumstances that social workers may navigate in this particular area of practice, the profession’s ethical commitments to self-determination are potentially in conflict with practices of involuntarily hospitalizing or providing mental health services to individuals. In fact, international health and human rights bodies have weighed in on the role of coercion in mental health treatment, advocating for decreased use of coercive means of confining and treating patients with severe mental illness. Critical perspectives on involuntary mental health services are often rooted in the critiques of psychiatric consumer/survivor/ex-patient organizers, who argue that detaining patients against their will and mandating them to participate in treatment or take medication is a form of violence that violates their rights. There are also some promising approaches to severe mental illness that promote self-determination and attempt to reduce the likelihood of involuntary or coerced treatment, reorienting toward the value of peer support and denouncing the use of nonconsensual active rescue in crisis hotline work. Abolitionists also advocate for the elimination of involuntary mental health services, advocating instead for the development of non-coercive forms of crisis response and care that rely on alternatives to the police.

The emerging subfield of queer communication pedagogy (QCP) marks an educative praxis that centers the liberation of queer and trans subjects and, specifically, those who are most violently impacted by racist cisheterosexism in the form of carceral logics and policing. Intersectional articulations of sex, gender, and sexual difference are disciplined and literally policed both in and out of the communication classroom. Course design, for instance, provides a disciplinary means for justifying the violent repression of sex, gender, and sexual difference in the classroom through activities that insist on a compulsory framing of gender in binary terms. Or, policing can emerge in the racist cisheterosexist pedagogue’s gaze that communicatively constitutes “incivility” out of racialized sex, gender, and sexual difference; this is evidenced in the violent policing of queer and trans students of color beginning with the school-to-prison pipeline and on into higher education settings where educators are empowered to call on campus police forces to remedy what they perceive as “unruly”—queer—students. QCP reflects histories comprising both critical communication pedagogy (CCP) and queer pedagogy. CCP, itself informed by critical pedagogy, is committed to liberatory educative ends driven by praxiological means derived of lived experience in historical context. That is, critical pedagogy takes as a point of departure lived experience as a means of resisting intersectional oppression and, in turn, enacting progressive social change. CCP strives toward these liberatory goals through communicative means, specifically dialogic encounters between/with/as students-and/as-teachers. Conversely, queer pedagogy refers to a destabilization of pedagogical presumption implicating the racist cisheteronormative foundation informing carceral-centered knowledge production and educative engagement. In turn, queer pedagogy labors toward the abolition of carcerality including the prison industrial complex and police state. Taken together, QCP marks an activist-oriented educative praxis that labors toward liberation of queer and trans subjects through the abolition of racist cisheterosexist carcerality.