The Abolition Movement: How Ordinary People Ended the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798190387223)

Twelve men met in a London printing shop in 1787 and decided to end the largest, most profitable trade on Earth. They had no army. No seat in Parliament. Most could not even vote. What they had was proof, patience, and a refusal to quit for as long as it took.

It took twenty years.

THE ABOLITION MOVEMENT is the true story of how they won anyway, and how an ocean away, a second generation of the enslaved, the escaped, and the unbought finished what the first had started.

This is not a textbook. It is the story of Olaudah Equiano, a formerly enslaved sailor whose bestselling memoir moved a nation before a single law was changed. Of Thomas Clarkson, who rode thirty five thousand miles on horseback gathering the evidence that would convict an empire. Of a ship called the Zong, whose crew threw one hundred and thirty two living human beings into the sea to collect an insurance claim, and whose court case became the spark that lit a sixty year fire. Of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, who turned a moral argument into a force no government could contain.

You will stand inside the hold of a slave ship measured to the inch by the men who profited from it. You will sit in the House of Commons on the night the vote finally came, two hundred eighty three votes to sixteen, after twenty years of defeat. You will watch a king's own son fight to stop it, and lose.

Every date, every vote, every name in this book is real. Nothing has been softened, and nothing has been invented.

This is history written the way the best stories are told, with stakes that matter, characters you will never forget, and an ending that took sixty years, two continents, and thousands of ordinary people who refused to accept that the world could not change.

It changed. This book tells you exactly how.