William Wilberforce

Lived

1759–1833

Era

Modern

Where

England

Tradition

Anglican

Twenty years of bills against the slave trade

A wealthy and popular MP whose evangelical conversion in 1785 nearly made him leave politics, until Newton and others persuaded him that he could do more inside it.

Why it matters

He introduced abolition bills year after year from 1791, losing repeatedly, until the trade was abolished in 1807; the act freeing the slaves in the British empire passed three days before he died, twenty-six years later. The work was never his alone — Equiano, Clarkson, Sharp and the Quaker committees did much of it, and the enslaved themselves did more, Haiti most of all. He was also a thorough political reactionary on almost everything else, supporting the suspension of habeas corpus and the laws against combinations of workers.

All the figures, from the apostolic age to the present, or the timeline they stand in.