The international abolition movement originated in England in the late 1700s for a mixture of humanitarian concerns and economic reasons (such as the increasing British trade with Africa), and resentment of French and Spanish occupation of the larger Caribbean islands. Slavery was outlawed in England and Wales by Lord Chief Justice Mansfield in 1772 and was definitively abolished throughout the British Empire in 1834-9. Meanwhile, having unilaterally outlawed the African slave trade form 1809, Britain began pressuring other nations to do likewise, even taking naval action against their slave ships.
Such pressure, allied to a growing number of abolitionists in Cuba itself, and in the United States, plus technological developments that undercut the economic advantages of forced labor, spelled the eventual doom of Cuban slavery. Despite the strength of such forces, this came about slowly. With the end of the US Civil War, the slave trade virtually ended, to be definitively outlawed in 1866. Moret’s Law of 1870 introduced a gradual abolition in Cuba, with most freed slaves subject to a period of tutelage, the patronato. This was not even popular among the former slave holders and it, and slavery itself, were definitively abolished in 1886.
