The Abolition of Slavery in the British Empire

After decades of campaigning by formerly enslaved writers, Quakers, and a mass public movement that gathered petitions with millions of signatures, Britain outlawed slavery across most of its empire — the same nation that had shipped roughly three million people across the Atlantic. Freedom came with a catch: the government paid compensation of £20 million, not to the enslaved, but to the slaveholders for their lost property. It is a case of an ideological movement reversing a system that had seemed permanent and profitable, without undoing what it had already built.