This panel examines politics and practices surrounding emancipation and abolition in the nineteenth-century slave societies of the US, Cuba, and Brazil. How did ideas and policies about emancipation and abolition flow through the Atlantic World? How did economic and political changes in one region affect the ways in which emancipation and abolition functioned in another? How did the characteristics of each geography shape adaptations to the emancipation and abolition policies circulating through these societies? The panel examines these geographies of emancipation and abolition as complex, evolving and interconnected, shaping the processes of emancipation and abolition in the last three slave societies in the Western Hemisphere. From geographical differences within one country, to international flows of ideas between countries, these three papers show that the ideas and ideals of emancipation and abolition were profoundly shaped by the geographies where they implemented. Alexander Lundberg’s research examines the implementation of a major Brazilian abolitionist law passed in 1871 that allowed slaves to save funds for their own self purchase to understand how geography--specifically rural versus urban settings—affected emancipation. Roberto Saba’s paper uncovers the influence of US post-emancipation narratives of progress, shared at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, on antislavery reform movements in Brazil and Cuba. Samantha Payne’s paper examines how an 1881 Brazilian law reforming voting rights affected freedpeople’s political participation in Brazil and served as an important precedent in constructing Jim Crow legislation in the 1890s. Taken together, these papers offer a novel perspective on the ways ideas about emancipation and abolition circulated between the last remaining slave societies of the Atlantic World, and how local conditions shaped their interpretation and implementation. This panel will draw scholars engaged in research on the US, Brazil, Cuba, and the Atlantic World, as well as research into nineteenth-century intellectual and legal currents, and notions of modernity and progress.