Challenged to write on the topic of slavery in a Cambridge essay contest, Thomas Clarkson uncovered the horrors of the enslavement of Africans in the slave trade, and purposed to do something about it. This essay won him an audience among the abolitionists, and he, along with William Wilberforce, would go on to lobby for the passage of the Slave Trade Act in 1807, which abolished the slave trade in the British empire.