Nothing better illustrates the strength of conservative regimes and the weakness of liberal reformers in Metternichian Europe than the persistence of serfdom in eastern Europe and slavery in European colonies. In 1700 virtually every state in Europe had practiced one of these forms of enslavement in some part of its territory. Britain had no serfs at home but had built slave economies in America. France had both serfdom at home and slavery in its colonies. Most of Russia, Prussia, and Austria lived in serfdom. During the Enlightenment, three important states abolished serfdom: Savoy, Baden, and Denmark. The abolition of serfdom during the French Revolution led to the spread of this idea to Switzerland, Poland, Prussia, and Bavaria. The French abolition of colonial slavery did not, however, persuade other slave states to follow, though Denmark and Britain both ended their slave trades, and the United States stopped the importation of new African slaves.

Abolitionists thus faced a great task in 1815. They won a few victories between 1815 and 1848, but millions of people in Western civilization remained in slavery or serfdom throughout the age of Metternich. Alexander I abolished serfdom in his Baltic provinces, and the revolutions of 1830 ended serfdom in several German states. At the beginning of 1848, however, feudal obligations still restricted peasants in the Austrian and the Hungarian portions of the Habsburg Empire, in a dozen German states (including Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the homeland of Queen Victoria's consort), in the Danubian provinces, and in Russia. The campaign against colonial slavery also made some progress yet left millions of people in bondage. The Congress of Vienna adopted a proclamation ending the slave trade in principle, but the same treaties accepted the existence of colonial slavery and returned lost colonies to Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and Spain knowing that these were to be slave economies. Europe then ignored the agreement ending the slave trade. The growing love of sweet foods demanded great quantities of cane sugar from Caribbean plantations, where sugar often accounted for 90 percent of the exports. Few people paused with the poet William Cowper, who wrote, "Think how many backs have smarted/For the sweets your cane affords." Thus, Bourbon France shipped more than 125,000 new slaves to the Caribbean between 1814 and 1831, and other slave states behaved similarly. In 1828 alone, 100,000 more African slaves were shipped to the Americas, despite the closing of the market in British colonies and the United States.

The Spanish revolution of 1820 led to a victory for abolitionism when the Spanish colonies won independence. The revolutionaries did not plan to end slavery at first, but Simon Bolivar realized that liberating slaves would increase his chances of victory. Bolivar adopted military manumission (freeing the slaves in areas conquered) in his campaigns after 1815, and his speech to the revolutionary congress of 1821 led to a Manumission Law. Bolivar thus doubly earned the nickname "El Libertador" (the liberator), by freeing a region from Spain and a class from slavery, but slavery persisted in those Spanish territories that did not win independence. Coffee and sugar plantations in Cuba required more than 200,000 slaves and those in Puerto Rico, 17,500. . . .

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