Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, whom Henry Louis Gates has dubbed the "invisible man" of the eighteenth century, was born in Africa around 1757 and sold into slavery as a boy. He was brought to England in 1772, just months after the historic Somerset case that abolished slavery in England, and was thereby emancipated.However, as he knew all too well, the slave trade persisted throughout the British Empire and the rest of Europe. Thoughts and Sentiments, the most radical assault published by a writer of African descent on slavery, was his response to the hypocrisy of Enlightenment Europe's attitude toward the evil institution. After a brief account of his early life, Cugoano launches an invective against the evils of slavery. He closes with a plea for the immediate emancipation of all slaves throughout the Empire, and for British efforts to quash the slave trade in other European countries.