The Africans in London who wrote, lobbied and rescued, the rebels in the Caribbean, and the women who stopped buying sugar: the real story of British abolition.
Ask in Britain who ended the slave trade and you will usually hear one name: William Wilberforce. His statue stands in Westminster Abbey, his birthplace in Hull is a museum, and school textbooks for generations told abolition as the story of a kind Yorkshire MP who persuaded Parliament to do the right thing.
That story leaves out most of the people who made abolition happen. It leaves out the Africans living in London who wrote books, lobbied MPs and rescued kidnapped men from ships on the Thames. It leaves out the enslaved people in the Caribbean who rose up again and again, and made slavery too dangerous and too expensive to keep. And it leaves out the hundreds of thousands of ordinary Britons, many of them women, who signed petitions and stopped buying sugar.
This page tells the wider story, and shows you where in Britain you can still find it.
By the 1780s London had a Black community of several thousand people. Some were still enslaved, many were free, and a small group of educated men among them became the first Black political organisation in Britain. They called themselves the Sons of Africa. They wrote letters to newspapers and MPs, spoke at public meetings, and went to Parliament in person to argue for abolition.
Born around 1745 in what is now south-eastern Nigeria, Equiano was kidnapped as a child, enslaved in Virginia and the Caribbean and at sea, and bought his own freedom. In 1789 he published The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. It went through nine editions in his lifetime, and he toured Britain and Ireland selling it and speaking against the trade. It made him the best-known African in Britain. In 1792 he married Susannah Cullen in the parish church of Soham, Cambridgeshire. He died in London in 1797, ten years before the trade he fought was abolished.
Taken as a boy from the Fante country of today's Ghana, Cugoano was the most radical voice of them all. His book of 1787 demanded not just the end of the slave trade but the immediate freeing of every enslaved person, which British abolitionists themselves did not dare to ask for until the 1820s. In 1786 he helped rescue Harry Demane, a Black Londoner who had been kidnapped and put on a ship bound for the Caribbean.
From Ajumako on the Gold Coast to Pall Mall: his full story.
Ignatius Sancho, born on a slave ship, ran a grocer's shop in Westminster and voted in parliamentary elections; his letters, published in 1782 after his death, showed Georgian readers an African writer of wit and learning. Mary Prince, born into slavery in Bermuda, was brought to London by her owners and walked out on them. In 1831 her History of Mary Prince became the first account by a Black woman published in Britain, and it gave the final campaign against slavery a voice that could not be ignored.
Enslaved people never accepted slavery, and their resistance did as much as any speech in Parliament to end it. In 1791 the enslaved of the French colony of Saint-Domingue rose up; by 1804 they had defeated France, Spain and Britain and founded Haiti, the first free Black republic. Every planter in the British Caribbean feared that the same could happen to them.
In the British colonies the risings came one after another. In 1816 thousands rose in Barbados in the revolt named after Bussa, including on estates owned by the Lascelles family of Harewood House. In 1823 some 10,000 or more rose in Demerara, in today's Guyana, led by an enslaved man on one of John Gladstone's plantations. At Christmas 1831, tens of thousands in Jamaica joined the strike and rising led by the Baptist deacon Samuel Sharpe, who was hanged in 1832. Each rising was put down with great brutality, and each convinced more people in London that slavery could not go on.
The organised campaign in Britain began with the Quakers, who had been speaking against slavery for decades. Granville Sharp, a civil servant with no legal training, taught himself the law to fight for Black Londoners threatened with being shipped back into slavery, and brought the Somerset case. Thomas Clarkson rode thousands of miles collecting evidence from sailors and ships' doctors in Bristol and Liverpool, and published what he found.
What made the campaign new was that it reached ordinary people. The potter Josiah Wedgwood made thousands of medallions showing a kneeling African in chains with the words "Am I not a man and a brother?". Towns all over Britain sent petitions to Parliament: more than a hundred in 1788 alone, the first from Manchester, and hundreds more in 1792. And from 1791 around 300,000 people refused to buy sugar grown by enslaved people, a boycott organised and carried mostly by women, who controlled the household shopping but could not vote.
Women pushed the movement further than its leaders wanted to go. In 1824 the Leicester Quaker Elizabeth Heyrick published a pamphlet demanding immediate, not gradual, abolition. Women's anti-slavery societies took up her call, and by 1831 the national movement had adopted it.
None of this makes William Wilberforce unimportant. Born in Hull in 1759, he was the campaign's voice in the House of Commons for nearly twenty years. He brought abolition bills again and again after defeats, and he used his friendship with the Prime Minister, William Pitt, to keep the question alive. The 1807 Act would not have passed when it did without him.
But he was one part of a much larger movement, and for most of his career he argued for ending the trade and only gradually ending slavery itself. Remembering him alone turns a story of African courage, Caribbean resistance and mass public pressure into a story of British kindness. The Africans who campaigned beside him, and the enslaved who resisted, deserve their place in it.
The London sites are all close together: Pall Mall and St James's Church are a few minutes' walk from Piccadilly Circus and Green Park stations, and Riding House Street is near Oxford Circus. Hull is about two and three-quarter hours from London King's Cross by direct train, and Wilberforce House is a short walk from Hull station. Soham is a short drive from Ely and Cambridge.
Wilberforce House is usually open Monday to Saturday from 10am to 4.30pm and on Sunday from 11am to 4pm, with free entry. Check the official Wilberforce House page before you go. The plaques can be seen at any time.
Guided walks through Westminster and St James's, and Black history walks in London, bring this story to life street by street. Entrance fees for the sights on a tour are always included in the price. Tips for your guide are not included, but they are welcome.
Abolition looked different from the African coast. The trade had shaped West African states for centuries, and its end in 1807 did not end slavery overnight, there or in the Americas.
The most radical abolitionist of them all came from today's Ghana.
The abolitionists' experiment in Sierra Leone.
How abolition was paid for, and who was paid.
Black Georgian London and the City that ran the trade.
The city of the first mass petition.
Britain Adventures is part of a network of independent sites on Africa and its history. These are the places where the stories on this page continue:
Search our Network. Start here.