Late to take up slaving, the Dutch were also late to give it up. Almost a century after the abolitionist William Wilberforce vowed to end slavery, and decades after the parliament in London abolished the slave trade on British ships, the Dutch were still going strong. The British officially abolished slavery in 1833, France a few years later. The Netherlands did not do so in its main slaving colony, Suriname, until 1863, and even then the ban was not fully implemented for another decade.
