Catalogue of Anti-Slave Trade Legislation in Global Perspective

This catalog of anti-slave trade legislation is a selection of key laws, treaties, conventions, and diplomatic agreements leading up to the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. The majority of these laws are from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. They relate to the global suppression of the slave trade. Using A Collection of Treaties, compiled by archivists in Britain's Foreign Office, Henry Lovejoy compiled the initial catalog from that collection using Google Books. This catalog references over 500 pieces of legislation, which have been made accessible and mapped on the reference resource www.liberatedafricans.org. These laws and treaties form the legal justification that various governments took to capture enslaved people and force them into involuntary indentures lasting several years or more. These indentured labourers from Africa were called \"Liberated Africans,\" although they were not free.