Anticipating Freedom reexamines the movement to abolish slavery in the British Caribbean during the early-mid nineteenth century. It uses Barbados as a case study to demonstrate that abolition was a complicated legal, social, and political process instead of a singular moment in time. The project places antislavery debates, ameliorative reforms, and slave resistance in one conceptual frame to understand how emancipation was achieved and how historical actors, including the enslaved, defined freedom once it was granted.