The central thesis in Atlantic History, Chapter 14 is that economic factors ultimately proved decisive in the abolition of slavery in the 19th<\/sup> century. Noting the importance of moralists, philosophers, and evangelicals in early British anti-slavery movements, the authors stressed that moral underpinnings alone did not succeed in swaying public opinion against the institution. As they asserted on page 477, \u201cthe more profitable slavery became, the more property rights trumped social evils.\u201d This establishes a direct relationship between the prevalence of slavery and its profitability, and characterizes the immorality linked to chattel bondage as altogether ineffective in dissuading it. Indeed, a huge obstacle to abolishing slavery was the fact it became such a lucrative institution that greatly enriched the British Empire and Atlantic cities (a concept discussed in a previous chapter) such as Liverpool and Bristol. Tellingly, a quarter of all slaves bought and sold during the course of the slave trade were transported after 1808, the year the British and the United States both formally barred it (477).<\/p>\n It was only once suitable replacements of labor could be found and the sustenance of slavery became too costly that abolition efforts actually took root among the worst offenders. In the British colony of Jamaica, a series of rebellions including those documented in Vincent Brown’s Slave Revolt in Jamaica <\/em><\/a>convinced planters to abandon the practice (477). Similarly, the declining cost of immigrant labor coupled with mounting international pressure finally lead to Brazil’s complete outlawing of slavery in 1888 (481). As my classmate Marissa Cervantes notes, mass European commodification of Atlantic goods \u201ccreated the demand for labor, which resulted in the demand of millions of enslaved people for labor<\/a>.\u201d The demand for labor, whether via indentured servitude, captive slaves, or voluntary migrant workers, simply needed to be filled, and proved a great hindrance to abolition efforts in the 19th<\/sup> century. Only when economic factors permitted did slavery die out as an Atlantic institution.<\/p>\n