The antislavery campaign was in many ways the cradle of the constellation of reform movements and ideologies that are usefully understood as part of a nineteenth-century global reform culture. Chapter 1 surveys the cultural legacy of antislavery among reformers, as it offers a typology of the main motifs and dominant memories. To set the stage for the following chapters, it discusses how abolitionism served both as an organized and as a cultural movement in the US, the UK, France, the Low Countries, and the German states. It argues that though organizational efforts were insignificant compared to the unprecedented scale of popular mobilisation achieved in the Atlantic World, the cultural impact in Continental Europe – divided into a pre- and post-Uncle Tom’s Cabin phase – was lasting and diverse. This impact was twofold: it lay both in the depictions of the institution of slavery that the movement promoted (in a coordinated fashion) and in the way abolitionism itself came to serve as a venerated model.

Chapter 2 uses three works of fiction, George Sand’s Indiana (1832), Luise Mühlbach’s Aphra Behn (1849), and Flora Tristan’s Pérégrinations d’une paria (1838), to explore how, in the 1830s and 1840s, Continental women’s rights advocates were working out a potent contradiction between the sentimental theme of women’s supposed moral influence and their practical powerlessness – the contradiction between their ‘sisterhood’ with either bourgeois reformers or with the enslaved. This theme has been previously identified as a productive paradox in American and British women’s rights argumentations of the period and this chapter shows that, building on the cultural influence of antislavery, women’s rights advocates in German and French communities were engrossed by it as well. The prominence of this theme in the work of three prominent figures in the literary and social reformist circles of their day is evidence of a broader cultural preoccupation, which the cases discussed in the later chapters build on. The chapter identifies different motifs and memories of antislavery, including the late eighteenth-century sugar boycott by British women.