Slavery in English literature

Everybody can say that slavery is a huge theme to be treated, actually it is. During the eighteenth century several litarary works focused on that theme.
In the early 1660s, when the events described in Behn´s Oroonoko are supposed to have taken place, England was not yet a major power in the slave trade. The first European slave traders were from Portugal. Soon, people from other countries found out about the slave trade. Spain was one of the biggest slave trading nations. England was one of the latest countries to start slave trade, during the reign of Charles II. Soon England became one of the biggest slave trading nations. This had a quite big repercussion on the mentality of some English writers: some of them started to write about their discontent regarding this subject.
Oroonoko has been seen by many writers as the pioneering antislavery work. After Oroonoko, comments on slavery in the works of many major British writers of the eighteenth century, including Samuel Johnson, William Cowper, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, denounced slavery. These writers were generally driven by their humanitarian and philosophical concern.
Also it has to be said that not all white British authors opposed slavery, and many travel narratives by participants in the trade and writings of racist thinkers such as Edward Long were used to reinforce public support for the slave trade. However, the intellectual and social climate created by British antislavery writers in the 1700s did a great deal to make possible the abolition of slavery in Britain in the early nineteenth century.

Presentation Post

Hi everybody!
This is my first post on my first blog. Perhaps all of you are wondering why that weird name, don´t you?Ok, I´m going to share with you my thoughts. We had to give our blogs a name related to the period of the Restoration, and as you know, APHRA BEHN was one of the most successful writers in that period (actually, her most remarkable work, Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave, was published during those years). But, probably, few people know that another name used for Aphra is "Affera", and that etimologically, Aphra means "dust". With this, my intention was to create a kind of wordplay, since although you do the dusting everyday, dust always stays everywhere, and this is what happens to Aphra Behn: she was and still is very influential for many writers,  that is, "she always stays everywhere".