author
William Wilberforce
1759–1833
A leading voice in the long campaign against the British slave trade, he brought moral urgency and political skill to one of the defining causes of his age. His life joined public service, religious conviction, and reform in a way that still feels vivid today.
4 Audiobooks
A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity.
by William Wilberforce
Lettre à l'Empereur Alexandre sur la traite des noirs
by William Wilberforce
A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade Addressed to the freeholders and other inhabitants of Yorkshire
by William Wilberforce
Private Papers of William Wilberforce
by William Wilberforce
About the author
Born in Hull on August 24, 1759, William Wilberforce became a Member of Parliament while still a young man and went on to serve for decades. He was closely connected with the evangelical revival in Britain, and after a deep religious change in the 1780s he devoted much of his public life to social reform.
Wilberforce is best known for his central role in the movement to end the British slave trade. Working with fellow abolitionists over many years, he repeatedly pressed the cause in Parliament until the slave trade was abolished in the British Empire in 1807. He later supported the wider campaign against slavery itself, and he lived just long enough to learn that legislation for abolition in British colonies would pass in 1833.
Alongside abolition, he supported other philanthropic and moral causes, and he became one of the most recognizable reformers of his time. He died in London on July 29, 1833, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, a sign of the national importance his work had come to hold.