The Clapham Circle

How 12 families in a London suburb abolished slavery

This is part two in a series about societies—rather than businesses or governments—that have made a meaningful impact on the world. Read part one here, and the series intro here.

Some stories stick with you right from the start. I stumbled onto the Clapham Circle (also called Clapham Sect) 15 years ago during my super-Christian phase, buried in an obscure biography of William Wilberforce. What I found wasn’t just history—it was a blueprint for changing the world against impossible odds.

Today, we’re reverse-engineering the ultimate 18th-century society: a group of neighbors who turned Sunday dinners into a 46-year masterclass in dismantling systemic evil. Let’s break down how 12 families in a London suburb took down the British slave trade—and what their playbook means for modern peaceful revolutionaries.

Who They Were (Plus, a Timeline)

The Clapham Sect wasn’t some formal NGO. It was a network. A distributed network of bankers, Ministers of Parliament, writers, and clergy who weaponized friendship to rewrite history’s rules.

The center of gravity: William Wilberforce. Imagine, as a loose comparison, if Elon Musk had a moral awakening at Burning Man. Wilberforce was born rich (Hull shipping dynasty), politically connected (MP at 21), and suddenly obsessed with ending slavery post-religious conversion. His superpower? Turning dinner parties into legislative war rooms.

Before jumping into insights from their story, take a look at the super-quick timeline of their collective work against slavery:

May 1787 - Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade founded, with Wilberforce as parliamentary leader

Feb 1788 - First major parliamentary speech by Wilberforce against slave trade

May 1789 - Wilberforce introduces first abolition bill to Parliament (defeated)

April 1791 - First major abolition bill defeated in Commons (163-88)

March 1796 - Another abolition bill defeated by just 4 votes

July 1799 - Slave Trade Regulation Bill passes (improved conditions on ships)

Feb 1807 - Slave Trade Act finally passes, abolishing British slave trade

May 1823 - Anti-Slavery Society founded by Clapham members

July 1833 - Slavery Abolition Act passes (Wilberforce dies 3 days later)

Aug 1834 - Slavery officially ended throughout British Empire

With that timeline in mind, let’s take a look under the hood of the Clapham Sect to unpack the most valuable insights for society builders.

The Clapham Operating System: 4 Unfair Advantages

There were lots of lucky and idiosyncratic elements that went right for this particular network of friends to make such an outsized impact on history. Without diving into every single one, here’s just four aspects of their society’s approach and strategy that made the biggest difference in their work:

1. The Compound Interest of Friendship

No org charts. No bylaws. Just John Venn’s rectory hosting weekly strategy dinners with:

- Bankers (Henry Thornton funded underground railroads)

- Lawyers (James Stephen exploited wartime loopholes)

- Media mavens (Hannah More’s pamphlets went viral)

Gathering on a regular cadence made a big difference for the diffused network, who traveled often for their work and their advocacy. Venn’s dinners anchored the network around a predictable ritual that made sure everyone had the opportunity to interact. And as their cause resonated with professionals from different walks of life—from finance to media, law to politics—the Clapham Sect found their network uniquely equipped to make a difference on multiple fronts (which a cause as vast as abolition certainly required).

2. Relentless Incrementalism

When full abolition failed, they passed the 1799 Slave Trade Regulation Act—forcing better conditions on ships to make slavery less profitable. When that stuck, they pushed harder along similar lines, using economics as the chief lever.

A lesson here is turn “no” into “not yet” by banking partial wins, while learning from what’s working to double-down on those strategies.

3. Weaponized Narrative

Though the policies ended up being based on economics, the Clapham Sect mostly didn’t argue economics when it came to persuasion. They made Brits see slavery:

- Funded former slaves to testify

- Published diagrams of slave ships

- Recruited Thomas Clarkson to gather 300+ eyewitness accounts, so that numbers became nausea

Sound familiar? It’s the 18th-century version of “show don’t tell” applied to humanitarian work.

4. The 100-Year Game

Wilberforce’s crew prepared successors. When Wilberforce retired in 1825, Thomas Fowell Buxton took the baton. Result? Slavery ended empire-wide eight years after Wilberforce’s death.

This is similar to what we saw with Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson’s decentralization of AA back to the community. Both projects were long-term efforts that kept in mind the need for succession—Wilberforce to Buxton (a central node of their network), and Wilson to the community (a decentralizing movement away from central leadership).

Thoughtfulness about your efforts requires thoughtfulness about continuation of those efforts, either until the job is done or—if its an infinite game, like combatting alcoholism—into perpetuity.

Their Unshakable Core (And Why It Mattered)

This quest of abolishing slavery wasn’t just about politics. To them, it was applied theology, with ideas animating action:

- “Gospel productivity”: Their interpretation of their faith demanded measurable impact against societal evils. If they weren’t working against societal evils (like slavery), they weren’t living their faith—which would’ve been the ultimate failure (much more than defeat in Parliament).

- Strategic patience: They saw themselves as “linkmen in a chain” across generations, continuing an expression of their faith—and its ideas for bringing good into the world—that went back to its beginnings.

- Moral jiu-jitsu: They often used opponents’ values against them (e.g., framing abolition as pro-British values—i.e., showing how abolition represented what it meant to be British more than their opponents’ views)

Final Thought

The Clapham Sect’s real innovation wasn’t ending slavery. It was proving that ordinary people practicing a moral innovation, relentlessly and strategically, can outlast empires.

And, most importantly, they exemplify a core lesson for would-be society builders within adversarial contexts: They turned incremental loss into ultimate victory. Their first abolition bill lost 163-88. Then by 4 votes. Then by procedural tricks. For 20 years.

Takeaway? No meaningful cause will go without resistance from incumbents benefitting from the status quo. So it’s clear from Clapham’s work that the ability to metabolize failure is paramount. Failure isn’t permanent. It’s simply data.

What’s a modern equivalent? Maybe it’s just a Discord group. Or a founder collective focused on hard social problems (rather than interesting commercial opportunities). A thing that looks small and unimportant—until it’s not.

Like a startup business, startup societies benefit from one core purpose—one core wrong you’re trying to right in the world. Whether the society is formalized (like Alcoholics Anonymous) or an informal network (like Clapham’s Sect), the central core is about righting a wrong—so that’s the starting point for anyone looking to create a startup society. That moral innovation is the basis from which everything else flows.

And as I wrote in my book review of The Network State:

Would you “die for the DAO” Antonio Garcia Martinez asks? Maybe not for the keto-society, or Bitcoin-society, or another one-commandment-society—but maybe someday the most exciting merge would be between startup societies (and not Ethereum’s Merge). Maybe the prospect of a patchwork new way of life inspires someone out there to take new political possibilities seriously. And in the meantime, this early in the game, it’s probably worth asking: what One Commandment matters enough (to me, to you) to create a startup society around? Or put more simply: What one idea is worth becoming courageous for?

What one idea is worth becoming courageous for? For the Clapham Sect, it was abolishing slavery. Without being dramatic, it’s possible that how we each answer this question can define our lives. I’m certainly still on the journey to sort it out myself, and in writing this series I hope to clarify how others have approached similar questions and arrived at meaningful, generative answers.

In the meantime, stay tuned for the next installment of Society Builders.