Britain abolished the transatlantic slave trade in 1807 and ended slavery across most of its empire in 1833, compensating owners rather than the enslaved; the United States abolished slavery in 1865 through the Thirteenth Amendment after the Civil War. These measures, alongside abolition elsewhere in the Americas, dismantled the legal framework of the Atlantic slave economy that had forcibly transported millions of Africans over three centuries. Emancipation was driven by sustained abolitionist campaigns, slave resistance and revolt, and shifting economic and political interests. Its social consequences unfolded over generations.
Abolition established the principle that human beings cannot be owned, transforming labour and citizenship, and emancipation set off large movements of freed people into towns and cities, fostering the growth of free Black neighbourhoods across the Atlantic world.
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