The year is 1780. A sailing ship is ploughing through heavy seas across the Atlantic, loaded almost to the gunwales with a cargo of human beings. They are chained together on narrow shelves, soaked in sweat, blood, vomit and excrement.

In a smart London club, an elegant young graduate fresh from Cambridge is seated at the gambling table, delighting his friends with his wit and charm. From a business family and already an MP, he has a fortune behind him and a promising career ahead.

Who would imagine that these two worlds could have anything in common? Yet that young man was to become the principal instrument in the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, the bicentenary of which we celebrate this weekend.

The current media focus on that amazing achievement is more than welcome. What is overlooked, however, is that William Wilberforce’s vision for a better world was grounded in the transformative potential of faith and business. For him and his allies, legitimate commerce, coupled with the gospel, would cut off the slave trade at its source in Africa.

Because all human beings share a common humanity, they argued, they enjoy equal rights to liberty. In fact, because liberty is God-given, it is wrong to deprive people of it through slavery. And because Christianity and legitimate commerce alike have human liberty at their core, they are destined to work together to transform society.

We can learn two things in particular from that great campaign. First, advocating liberty may involve defying majority opinion. In Wilberforce’s time, most Christians accepted slavery as a fact of life. Today, the consensus in the churches is that global commercial enterprise inevitably impoverishes both rich and poor – the former spiritually, the latter materially. Wilberforce offers us a more positive assessment of the spiritual and material potential of faith-full business in the cause of freedom.

Second, when faith ignites a commitment to freedom, the effect can be dramatic. In the last 50 years, churches have made a crucial contribution to the US civil rights movement, the decline of communism, the end of apartheid, the cancellation of international debt and the promotion of fair terms for trade. Now, they are mobilising to tackle contemporary forms of slavery.

As in Wilberforce’s day, rationalist scepticism is on the rise. But history reminds us that when faith awakens to the call of liberty, it can transform culture – on a global scale.

Peter Heslam

Dr Peter Heslam is associate faculty at LICC and director of Transforming Business at Cambridge University.

additional resources

Garth Lean’s biography of William Wilberforce, God’s Politician, has been reissued with a foreword by Jim Wallis – but it's in competition with new lives by Stephen Tomkins and, rather tardily, William Hague.

Hollywood’s version of the story of Wilberforce, Amazing Grace, opens across Britain today and is reportedly not too bad. Here is one early review. For an interesting perspective, read the Guardian’s interview of Youssou N’Dour, who plays Olaudah Equiano, the slave who bought his freedom and became a successful businessman and a crucial abolitionist.

For a scholarly new historical account of the abolitionist movement, see Christopher Leslie Brown’s Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, in partnership with Hull University and Anti-Slavery International, has published a groundbreaking report on the contemporary slave trade in which Britain once again plays a central role. For a summary and the full report, click here.

Wallis’s fellow Sojourner David Batstone has just put out a book on present-day slavery titled Not for Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade – and How We Can Fight It. For the international political campaign tied in with the film Amazing Grace, check out theamazingchange.com. For the global coalition against slavery today, go to stopthetraffik.org. And for Christian action on behalf of people trafficked for the sex trade, particularly in Europe, see chaste.org.uk.

Finally, tomorrow you can join the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, along with archbishops from the West Indies and Ghana and senior figures from the Methodist Conference, the Baptist Union, the Evangelical Alliance and the African and Caribbean Evangelical Alliance, in a ‘walk of witness’ in London to commemorate the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. The event has a threefold theme of remembrance, repentance and restoration, and also marks the end of the March of the Abolitionists, who tomorrow complete their 250-mile journey in chains from Hull to Westminster.