Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the transatlantic slave trade delivered millions of Africans to American markets but also encountered serious attempts to dismantle what contemporaries called the ‘Guinea traffic’, all of which were eventually successful. One by one, different nations – Britain, Denmark, the United States, Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, Brazil – abolished their slave trades for various reasons. The demolition of the slave trade mainly occurred in the first half of the nineteenth century by the same governments who had created it. Moral and humanitarian criticism of what has been described as ‘the cruellest commerce’ was one significant component in the motivation to eradicate the slave trade. But there were always other factors lying behind anti-slave trade sentiment, including economics, political decisions and pragmatic considerations, all of which combined with humanitarian abolitionism, in varying proportions in different countries, to bring about slave trade abolition.