1831 as The History of Mary Prince. The book caused a commotion as it was the first account published in Great Britain of a black slave woman's life; at a time when anti-slavery agitation was growing, her first person account touched many people. In the first year, it sold out three printings. Two libel cases arose out of it, and Prince was called to testify at each. She is known to have remained in England until at least 1833, when she testified in the two Washington cases. That year, the Slavery Abolition Act was passed, to be effective August 1834. In 1808, Parliament had passed the Slave Trade Act of 1807, which outlawed the slave trade but not slavery itself. The 1833 law was intended to achieve a two-staged abolition of West Indian slavery by 1840, allowing the colonies time to transition their economies. Because of popular protests in the West Indies among the freedmen, the colonies legally completed abolition two years early in 1838. The History of Mary Prince When Prince's book was published, slavery was arguably still legal in England, and had not been clearly abolished by the 1772 Somerset v Stewart ruling, as previously believed by historians and contemporaries. Parliament had also not yet abolished it in the colonies. There was considerable uncertainty about the political and economic repercussions that might arise if Britain imposed an end to slavery throughout the empire, as the sugar colonies depended on it for labour to raise their lucrative commodity crop. As a personal account, the book contributed to the debate in a manner different from reasoned analysis or statistical arguments. Its tone was direct and authentic, and its simple but vivid prose contrasted with the more laboured literary style of the day. An example is Prince's description of being sold away from her mother at a young age: It was night when I reached my new home. The house was large, and built at the bottom of a very high hill; but I could not see much of it that night. I saw too much of it afterwards. The stones and the timber were the best things in it; they were not so hard as the hearts of the owners. Prince wrote of slavery with the authority of personal experience, something her political opponents could never match. She wrote: I have been a slave myself—I know what slaves feel—I can