'...the abolition of chattel slavery. Slavery had been a source of forced labor since the dawn of civilization.'<blockquote>'Perhaps one of the most stunning historical changes to result from an underlying ideological change in people's preferences was the abolition of chattel slavery. Slavery had been a source of forced labor since the dawn of civilization. People had owned slaves on every continent and for every conceivable task. Slavery, along with such other forms of unfree or quasifree labor as serfdom, debt bondage, involuntary apprenticeship, and indentured servitude, was the unenviable status of most humans prior to the Industrial Revolution.
Although no one liked being a slave, the institution was universally accepted as inevitable if not desirable until the first stirrings of antislavery fervor emerged in the late 18th century. Today, in contrast, we live in a world where the freedom to quit a job at will has become the accepted standard. Slavery may still persist clandestinely, but no ruler, no matter how vile or ruthless, would dare get up and publicly endorse owning another human being.
The abolitionist movement, despite beginning as a minuscule minority in most countries, eliminated in a little over a century a labor system that had been ubiquitous for millennia. The British Parliament, for instance, abolished the slave trade in 1807 and ended slavery itself in the colonies a quarter-century later. These events occurred at a time when slave labor was still providing enormous economic benefits not only to certain special interests, but to all British consumers. The 19th-century English historian W.E.H. Lecky concluded that the "unweary, unostentatious, and inglorious crusade of England against slavery may probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous pages comprised in the history of nations,"[<a href="[
mises.org];] and modern scholarship has generally confirmed this evaluation, at least with respect to British antislavery. The abolition of chattel slavery thus stands as the most impressive and enduring of all of classical liberalism's triumphs.
The antislavery movement itself had its origins in another major ideological transformation — the American Revolution. As John Adams reminisced in a series of letters many years afterward,
<blockquote>What do we mean by the revolution? The war? That was no part of the revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. … [T]he revolution was complete, in the minds of the people, … before the war commenced in the skirmishes of Concord and Lexington on the 19th of April, 1775. … This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution."[<a href="[
mises.org];]</blockquote>
Admittedly, the Revolution mobilized special interests that would benefit from severing any political connection with Great Britain, but it also prompted drastic improvements in public policy. These included the disestablishment of state churches in the South, the gradual emancipation of slaves or outright abolition of slavery in the North, the establishment everywhere of republican governments under written state constitutions with limitations on power embodied in bills of rights, and the extirpation of the last remnants of feudalism — quit-rents, entail, and primogeniture — where they still remained. Moreover, the revolution set off a cascade of ideological externalities that had worldwide impacts.
Other examples that might be mentioned include the successful campaign of Richard Cobden and John Bright to repeal Britain's protectionist Corn Laws in 1846, within a century of Adam Smith having expressed pessimism about such an outcome; the final termination of British rule in India in 1947, after three decades of mostly nonviolent civil disobedience inspired by Mahatma Gandhi; and the nearly peaceful collapse between 1989 and 1991 of Communist dictatorships throughout the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, which are among the bloodiest and most tyrannical regimes in recent history.'
- Edward Stringham and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel,
First, Ideological Change; Second, Social Change, September 10, 2010</blockquote>