One way and another slavery has a long history - but it's a mistake to see the Atlantic slave trade, and the consequent chattel slavery which disfigured American history, as just as a survival from the bad old days. It was a new social invention, different in a number of ways from previously existing slaveries - in its way modern and up-to-date, in the same way that the industrial manufacturing system was a new social invention, modern and up-to-date.

The analogy was frequently drawn at the time. Advocates of the chatel slave system would point at the evils of the industrial manufacturing system, and claim that so-called "free labour" involved suffering and degradation, and loss of freedom, as bad as or even worse than the slave system, and was in fact just a camouflaged form of slavery.

As a defence of the slave system it was a fallacious and distorting argument - but it contained an element of truth. And it still does today. The peculiar form of slavery initiated by Europeans and developed so horribly in America is gone, but other forms of slavery and near-slavery are flourishing around the world.

But the historical anti-slavery movement does indeed have the importance that RichM's post claims for it - it shows how it is indeed possible for horrible evils, which are apparently universally accepted and inevitable, to be swept away by determined opposition. And in the case of Britain, it was achieved without a shot being fired.