Brussels Act establishes an international anti-slave-trade regime

The law formally ended slavery but required formerly enslaved people to remain under patronato, a labor regime that preserved coercive control. Resistance and pressure led to its early termination...

European governments opened a conference to regulate their territorial and commercial competition in Africa. No African state or community was represented as an equal participant. The conference’s...

The General Act included provisions against the slave trade in the Congo basin while formalizing rules for European claims and navigation. Its antislavery language operated within a colonial project...

The Spanish government brought legal slavery in Cuba to an end after a gradual transition that had included an apprenticeship-like regime. The delay reflected the political power of plantation...

Brazil’s Lei Áurea formally abolished slavery, making it the last country in the Americas to do so. The law followed sustained resistance by enslaved people, mass escapes, abolitionist mobilization,...

Organized by Trinidadian lawyer Henry Sylvester Williams, this meeting brought activists from Africa, the Caribbean, Britain, and the United States into a shared political forum. It challenged...

The congress debated racial equality and imperial power in an era when colonial rule was presented as a civilizing mission. Du Bois and other Black intellectuals used the international meeting to...

Held during the Paris Peace Conference, the congress demanded that Africans and people of African descent have a say in the postwar order. Its delegates linked colonial self-government and racial...

The ILO constitution made labor conditions an international concern in the postwar order. Its early framework coexisted with colonial forced labor and unequal representation; workers and...

The treaty entered into force, bringing the League of Nations into being and creating an international body that addressed slavery and forced labor. The new order remained dominated by empires and did...