In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, liberal political economists stood among the strongest supporters of the abolition of slavery. In this dissertation, I develop a conception of capitalist abolitionism to investigate how J.E. Cairnes, Harriet Martineau, Herman Merivale, José Antonio Saco, Adam Smith, and Alexis de Tocqueville ideologically reproduced dynamics of racial capitalism through their emancipation schemes for the British and French Caribbean, Cuba, and the U.S. South. I conceive of capitalist abolitionism as constituted by three elements. First, liberal political economists disavowed the capitalist character of enslaved labor by at once acknowledging and denying its productivity, profitability, and efficiency, and the introduction of technological development to plantation production. Second, anti-slavery liberals insisted that the process of emancipation should be managed by the state so as to transform the enslaved into disciplined and productive wage-laborers and deter them from engaging in rebellions that would be violent and economically costly. Third, I use the concept of primitive accumulation to examine how liberal political economists called for deploying coercive state power to forcibly place the land, labor, and movement of ex-slaves and migrant workers under the fold of capital accumulation. Through mechanisms restricting the purchase of cheap land, stealing wages, and constraining movement, Black workers would be separated from the means of production, transformed into poorly paid proletarians, and divided between men working in the fields and women engaging in household labor. Even more, free African American, Chinese, European, and Indian workers would be forcibly transported to the Anglo-Caribbean and Cuba in order to replace former slaves in sugar plantations. Developing a conception of capitalist abolitionism, this dissertation highlights how racial capitalism endured after slavery ended through the emancipation projects of liberal political economists, who reinforced extra-economic coercive control over workers of various races in the process of transitioning from slavery to free labor. Moreover, it traces the transnational entanglements of liberal ideologies of empire and anti-slavery that moved between various imperial spaces in the Americas and the Caribbean.