Skip to content
Wellsprings
William Wilberforce

William Wilberforce

1759 CE1833 CE · Reformer · Kingston upon Hull

William Wilberforce was a British politician and social reformer. Born in Hull in 1759 and educated at St John's College, Cambridge, he entered the House of Commons in 1780, aged twenty-one, later representing Yorkshire. Following an evangelical conversion in 1785, he became the parliamentary leader of the campaign to abolish the transatlantic slave trade, introducing abolition bills repeatedly from 1789. The Slave Trade Act passed in 1807. He continued to work toward ending slavery itself; the Slavery Abolition Act passed in 1833, days before his death. Associated with the Clapham Sect, he also promoted numerous moral and philanthropic causes. He is buried in Westminster Abbey.

See William Wilberforce’s journey on the map →

Life journeyclick any stop, or use ←/→Trace on the map →

Stop 1 of 5Born

Kingston upon Hull

We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.

See other sages who lived in Kingston upon Hull

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers, teachers, and rulers whose lives overlapped with William Wilberforce’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Luminaries & Explorers world

Works

No works attributed in the corpus yet.