William Wilberforce: the great emancipator by Keith Windschuttle

Features

June 2008

William Wilberforce: the great emancipator

by Keith Windschuttle

On William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner by William Hague.

Burke

was right!

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In March 2007, on the two-hundredth anniversary of the British parliament’s decision to abolish the slave trade, there was a flurry of contention in the letters pages of several newspapers and blogs. The points at issue were whether the British had really been the first in the world to take such action and whether the parliamentarian William Wilberforce deserved as much credit as he was then getting in the news media. Those taking umbrage were members of the political Left, who were determined to insist their side always led the way in the progress and liberation of the downtrodden. They claimed the first to abolish slavery were actually the Jacobins of the French Revolution in 1794, thirteen years before the British. The last thing they wanted to concede was that one of the greatest single blows ever struck in the history of human freedom had been initiated and enacted by a conservative, middle-class Englishman heading a political movement of eva ...

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Keith Windschuttle is an author and publisher who is a frequent contributor to The New Criterion and Quadrant. He is author of The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past, which is now in its fourth edition from Encounter Books, and five other books on contemporary social issues. His book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847, will be published by Macleay Press, Sydney, in November. He is publisher of Macleay Press, Sydney. He is a graduate in history from the University of Sydney and in politics from Macquarie University. He is a former academic who taught history, social policy and media studies the University of New South Wales and other Australian universities. His principal research interests are in historiography, especially of Australian and American history, and in the theories of history produced in the last two hundred years.