Abolition

Abolition is the act or policy of formally ending a system, practice, or institution. While commonly associated with ending slavery, the term can apply to other practices such as capital punishment, serfdom, or colonial practices. The word derives from Latin abolere, through Old French abolition, and has taken on specialized meanings in different legal and political contexts.

In the context of slavery, abolition refers to movements and laws aimed at eradicating enslaved labor and the slave trade. In Britain, the transatlantic slave trade was banned by the Slave Trade Act of 1807, and slavery itself was abolished in most colonies by the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. In the United States, abolitionism grew in the 1830s and involved figures such as Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman; slavery was formally prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 after the Civil War. Other regions experienced abolition through revolutions or legal reforms, such as Haiti’s early 19th-century moves toward emancipation. Across the 19th and 20th centuries, many countries gradually repealed or reformed legal slavery and related institutions.

Beyond slavery, abolitionist ideas have informed efforts to end capital punishment, unjust detention, and modern forms of coercive labor, including human trafficking and forced labor. In contemporary discourse, abolitionists advocate for legal, social, and economic reforms to dismantle harmful systems and replace them with protections, rights, and alternatives that uphold human dignity. The term therefore denotes both historical movements and ongoing policy debates about ending entrenched practices.