The Slave's Cause

Abolitionists are often portrayed as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. This book broadens the chronology of abolition beyond the antebellum period as well as recasts it as a radical social movement in which men and women, black and white, free and enslaved found common ground in causes ranging from feminism to anti-imperialism. This new history sets the abolition movement in a transnational context and illustrates how the abolitionist vision ultimately linked the slave’s cause to the struggle to redefine democracy and human rights across the globe.