movement is studied in depth with much attention given to slaveholder and abolitionist views, but the work also reveals events and forces which undermined slavery during its final years: the ending of the African traffic and the resulting decline of the slave population; an internal slave trade which concentrated slaves and pro-slavery sentiment into the richest agricultural regions; abolition in the United States which induced in Brazil a policy of gradual emancipation through free birth; and finally, slave resistance culminating in a massive runaway movement in 1887-1888. Many comparisons are made with slavery in the United States.

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