Antislavery Literature and the Decline of Hell

This article argues that the afterlife was a central component of antislavery literature throughout the long eighteenth century. Surveying antislavery writings by James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Hannah More, William Cowper, Ignatius Sancho, and others, it contends that slavery led many abolitionists to reconsider the requirements for salvation and to afford heaven to non-Christian Africans enslaved across the globe. The article therefore revises scholarly narratives of hell's decline, insisting that it is best understood not simply as an idea in European intellectual history but as a complex set of responses to global oppression and political injustice.