Going global: British abolitionists and the campaign to export anti-slavery

This article explores the global campaign against slavery carried out by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (the BFASS) during the nineteenth century. The BFASS strove to frame British anti-slavery as exportable to settings abroad, including the USA, Brazil, Spain, and the Netherlands. Drawing on a range of primary sources—including newsletters, meeting minutes, and memos—this article unpacks how the BFASS repurposed the British anti-slavery movement into the global anti-slavery movement. In pursuit of this aim, the BFASS was a flawed organization that adopted positions toward Britain’s naval effort to suppress the trade of enslaved persons in the Atlantic and the North’s campaign within the American Civil War incongruous with its commitment to abolitionism. Accordingly, the article explores why the organization adopted policy positions that contradicted its professed mission.