The first national abolitionist petition campaign to end the slave trade in britain kicked off in 17 88. The very next year, those ten thousand or so people had mushroomed to a hundred thousand. Four years later, an estimated 400 thousand in britian signed the similar petition. We keep saying that slavery seems like an ancient institution out of place in a world this modern. But it is about to get much better and much worse,. because the forces of anti-slavery thought are beginning to coalesce and become powerful.