William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, was a British barrister, politician and judge noted for his reform of English law. As Lord Chief Justice, Mansfield modernised both English law and the English courts system; he sped up the system for...

The Treaty of Utrecht, which established the Peace of Utrecht, comprises a series of individual peace treaties, rather than a single document, signed by the belligerents in the War of the Spanish Succession, in the Dutch city of Utrecht in...

Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein was a Dutch Christian minister of Ghanaian birth who was one of the first known sub-Saharan Africans to study at a European university and one of the first Africans to be ordained as a minister in the Dutch R...

Major-General Robert Clive, also known as Clive of India, Commander-in-Chief of British India, was a British officer and privateer who established the military and political supremacy of the East India Company in Bengal. He is credited with...

John Newton was an English clergyman and hymn writer. Until 1755, his life was spent chiefly at sea, where he eventually became the captain of a slave ship plying the waters between Liverpool and Sierra Leone. For the subsequent five years...

Ignatius Sancho was a composer, actor, and writer. He is the first known Black Briton to vote in a British election. He gained fame in his time as "the extraordinary Negro", and to 18th century British abolitionists he became a symbol of th...

Josiah Wedgwood was an English potter, founder of the Wedgwood company, credited with the industrialization of the manufacture of pottery. A prominent abolitionist, Wedgwood is remembered for his "Am I Not A Man And A Brother?" anti-slavery...

Warren Hastings was the first Governor-General of Bengal, from 1772 to 1785. He was famously accused of corruption and impeached in 1787, but after a long trial he was acquitted in 1795. He was made a Privy Counsellor in 1814....

Thomas Paine, intellectual, scholar, revolutionary, and idealist, is widely recognized as one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A radical pamphleteer, Paine anticipated and helped foment the American Revolution through his power...

Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquess Cornwallis KG, PC, styled Viscount Brome between 1753 and 1762 and known as The Earl Cornwallis between 1762 and 1792, was a British Army officer and colonial administrator. In the United States and the...

Admiral Arthur Phillip RN was a British admiral and colonial administrator. Phillip was appointed Governor of New South Wales, the first European colony on the Australian continent, and was the founder of the settlement which is now the cit...

François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture, also Toussaint Bréda, was a leader of the Haitian Revolution. Born in Saint-Domingue, in a long struggle for independence Toussaint led enslaved Africans and Afro-Haitians to victory over French colo...

Olaudah Equiano also known as Gustavus Vassa, was one of the most prominent Africans involved in the British movement of the abolition for the slave trade. His autobiography depicted the horrors of slavery and helped influence British lawma...

Sir William Jones was an Anglo-Welsh philologist and scholar of ancient India, particularly known for his proposition of the existence of a relationship among Indo-European languages. He, along with Henry Thomas Colebrooke and Nathaniel Hal...

Jeremy Bentham was a British philosopher, jurist, and social reformer. He is regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism. Bentham became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas inf...