Slavery

In 1807 Parliament abolished the slave trade throughout the British Empire. In 1833 it abolished the institution of slavery. The nation, which had been one of the world's slave powers in the previous century, now remade itself into a global antislavery policeman. Over the next several decades, Victorian writers confronted the legacy of Atlantic slavery in the British colonies and also redirected their focus to slavery in the United States, which would not be abolished until the 1860s, with the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment (1865).