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.