The Introduction provides an overview of the book. It charts the origin of the antislavery concept of Jubilee and the concept of British Emancipation as a "mighty experiment." It discusses the major themes of the book as well as its influences, including historiographies of British slavery and empire, the post-emancipation Anglo-West Indies, as well as American slavery and abolitionism. It also lays out the methodologies utilized in the study and concludes with a summation of each chapter.

This chapter provides a study of commemorations of British Emancipation in the Atlantic world and their political meanings, exploring their transnational divergences and intersections in the cultural production of freedom. Starting with the Caribbean, it examines freedpeople’s celebrations of emancipation and how this at times conflicted with missionary and colonial elites’ directives on how freedom and slavery should be remembered and memorialized. In the United States, it traces the development of celebrations of August 1 and argues that these events arose out of attempts to shape public perceptions on the success of the experiment. August 1 enabled abolitionists and African Americans to publicly merge political and intellectual thoughts with the transnational triumph of British Emancipation toward an antislavery strategy at home.