"This book is a transnational history of black abolitionism in Brazil. In the last country to abolish slavery in the Western Hemisphere, enslaved and free Africans and their descendants crafted their visions of liberation by thinking comparatively about the uneven spread of abolition across the Atlantic world. Between the 1840s and 1860s, they acted on the idea that the end of slavery anywhere placed freedom on the horizon in Brazil. Thus, they pursued alliances with British diplomats, rose in arms at the sight of both Union and Confederate warships off Brazil's Atlantic coast, sought free soil at foreign consulates, on ships, and in maroon settlements (called quilombos), and organized uprisings for immediate abolition after learning of international emancipation struggles in the newspapers. This book shows that through flight, marronage, rebellion, and literacy practices, enslaved and freedpeoples developed a geopolitical imagination in dialogue with the British campaign against the slave trade (banned in Brazil in 1850), French antislavery, the Haitian Revolution, the U.S. Civil War, and the Triple Alliance War in South America. This book shows that abolitionism was more than just the cause of North Atlantic reformers, Latin American modernizing elites, or middle class advocates. It was a grassroots movement originating in the social and conceptual worlds of the enslaved and connected to a hemispheric black radical tradition"--Publisher's description.