Setting the captives free
James Gubb, 27 March 2007
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 week, writes Dr Peter Heslam.
The current media focus on that amazing achievement is more than welcome. What is overlooked, however, is that William Wilberforces 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 Wilberforces 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 religion 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 Wilberforces 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.
www.licc.org.uk/culture/setting-the-captives-free
Dr Peter Heslam is associate faculty at LICC and director of Transforming Business at Cambridge University: www.transformingbusiness.net.