Historical figure · Pearson Edexcel International GCSE revision on Incandio

William Wilberforce

Twenty Years Against the Trade · Parliamentary Abolitionist · 1759–1833

The evangelical MP who led the parliamentary campaign against the British slave trade, abolished in 1807, alongside Black writers, Quaker campaigners and the resistance of enslaved people; he died days after the Commons passed the 1833 Slavery Abolition Bill.

Why Wilberforce is on Incandio

Incandio is a free revision platform for the Pearson Edexcel International GCSE. Its historical figures are the people a student learns from, questions and — where a specification topic is theirs — defends an idea against. William Wilberforce can be questioned here in a dramatised, historically grounded portrayal, and the five-chapter life below is written to be read alongside the course.

Who was Wilberforce?

Wilberforce was born in Hull in 1759. At Cambridge he became a friend of William Pitt and entered Parliament at twenty-one. An evangelical conversion in 1784–86 shaped the rest of his life. From 1787 he worked with the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade — founded by Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp and Quaker campaigners — to bring abolition before Parliament, using evidence about the Middle Passage and the testimony of formerly enslaved writers such as Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano. His bills were defeated repeatedly through the 1790s, slowed by fear of revolution after the Saint-Domingue uprising. The slave trade was abolished in 1807. Slavery itself continued in the colonies. Wilberforce helped found the Anti-Slavery Society in 1823 and retired in 1825. Risings by enslaved people — in Demerara in 1823 and Jamaica in 1831 — pressed Parliament further. The Slavery Abolition Bill passed the Commons days before Wilberforce died in July 1833; it paid £20 million to slave-owners and nothing to the enslaved.

Major achievements

• Led the parliamentary campaign that abolished the British slave trade in 1807
• Gave the first great Commons speech against the trade on 12 May 1789
• Co-founded the Anti-Slavery Society in 1823
• Supported the founding of Sierra Leone as a settlement for freed Africans

Life in brief

• 1759 — Born in Hull
• 1780 — Elected MP for Hull
• 1785 — The 'great change': Evangelical conversion; John Newton advises him to stay in politics.
• 1787 — The abolition society founded: Clarkson, Sharp and Quaker campaigners.
• 1789 — First Commons speech against the trade: Equiano's Interesting Narrative published the same year.
• 1807 — Slave Trade Act: Royal assent 25 March.
• 1831 — The Jamaica rising: Led by Samuel Sharpe; brutally suppressed.
• 1833 — Dies 29 July: Days after the Commons passes the Slavery Abolition Bill.

Explore the life of Wilberforce — five chapters

1. The Great Change — A rich young MP turns evangelical
2. The Campaign He Joined — Quakers, Clarkson, and an oak tree at Holwood
3. The Witnesses — Equiano, Cugoano, and the Sons of Africa
4. Twenty Years to 1807 — Defeat after defeat, and a conservative at home
5. 1833 — Emancipation, apprenticeship, and twenty million pounds

Read the five-chapter life of William Wilberforce →

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