If we read history to learn about our ancestors and, by extension, ourselves, few subjects should be more compelling than the transatlantic slave trade. A large portion of humanity is tainted by its legacy. Yet for all the books, films and broadcasts generated by this year’s bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British empire, the discussion spawned by the anniversary has been muted.

Those hoping for a debate about apologies and reparations have so far been disappointed. It is not so much that there is indifference to what is sometimes called the “African Holocaust” or Maafa (a Kiswahili term for “disaster” or “terrible occurrence”). Few dispute that what happened was shameful. But there is a sense that it is something that remains in the past, despite talk about the continuing emotional damage to people of African origin and the contribution slavery may have made to under-development of Africa and the Caribbean.

The heirs of the slave trade’s perpetrators could benefit from a deeper contemplation of what created it and what ended it. Many people can, at a stretch, distance themselves from other historical horrors - what Adolf Hitler did to Jews, gypsies and homosexuals, or what Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong did to millions of their own countrymen. Not so with the transatlantic slave trade.

For white Europeans and Americans, it was our forbears who created and sustained this tragic trade. Its legacy is all around: in the structure of our societies; in our wealth, homes and public buildings; in the way people of African descent remain confined to marginal roles in the countries that practised slavery.

Slavery has existed as long as human society; millions remain today in some form of forced or bonded labour. There is little to compare, however, with the story of how, over more than three centuries, some 12 million Africans were seized, transported to the Americas and forced, amid unimaginable cruelty, to grow the sugar, tobacco, rice and cotton on which western societies prospered.

White readers must ask themselves: how do we balance guilt with pride in those who ultimately campaigned to end slavery? Today it seems so wrong, but, until the mid-18th century, few white people raised ethical objections. Britain did not initiate the transatlantic slave system, yet came to dominate it. Parliament passed at least 100 acts to assist the trade’s growth, before it outlawed the trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833.

Any reading of the dozens of books published on the subject this year must confront awkward questions. How far should this anniversary be a memorial of the trade and how far a commemoration of the man who led the campaign to end it?

This question applies to the eagerly awaited publication of William Hague’s William Wilberforce. Inevitably, any life of Wilberforce - and Hague’s is not the only one this year - must dwell on his role and that of other British campaigners. As with Michael Apted’s film Amazing Grace, the book carries the risk that a black tragedy becomes a story of white heroism. Yet Wilberforce was a fascinating figure, as significant as the Duke of Wellington or William Pitt the Younger, for example, but less well-known.

Hague, the former Conservative leader and current shadow foreign secretary, does his fellow Yorkshireman proud, amply fulfilling the promise of his earlier biography of Pitt. An accomplished parliamentary speaker, Hague is brilliantly suited to conveying the drama of a period in which, unlike today, eloquence and persuasion played a real role. More than that, he succeeds in bringing Wilberforce to life, the private man as well as the public orator.

The son of a merchant from the east coast city of Hull - significantly, not a slaving port - Wilberforce entered parliament with a talent for both politics and pleasure, before undergoing a conversion to the evangelicalism that swept Britain in the late 18th century. That gave him his sense of purpose and accountability to God.

Asked by friends, including Pitt, to lead the parliamentary battle to end the slave trade, he was the perfect choice for what proved an arduous, 20-year effort. The optimism of 1787, when the abolition campaign began in earnest, had subsided by 1794: determined opposition, fear of the French revolution and a bloody slaves’ revolt on San Domingo, the French colony that became Haiti, undermined popular support. Wilberforce plugged away, putting forward parliamentary motions until the tide turned in the abolitionists’ favour 10 years later.

He divided opinion even in his own time. To the voters of Hull he was “one of the illustrious benefactors of mankind” but to the radical William Cobbett, he was a “canting hyprocrite”. Cobbett wrote: “You seem to have a great affection for the fat and lazy and laughing and singing and dancing Negroes... I feel for the care-worn, the ragged, the hard-pinched, the ill-treated, and beaten down and trampled upon labouring classes of England, Scotland and Ireland to whom... you do all the mischief that it is in your power to do.”

In spite of his stance on slavery, Wilberforce was an establishment figure who supported measures against radicals, such as internment without trial during the war with France and the combination acts restricting trade-union activity. Others criticised him as a temporising compromiser, or sought to downplay his importance compared with other anti-slavery campaigners. Hague makes this reasonable defence: “[Wilberforce’s] cautious and conservative disposition on the maintenance of domestic political and economic order ensured that his views on the slave trade were listened to.”

Hague is strong on context: on the growth of Methodism and evangelicalism, for example, and on the licentiousness of Hanoverian Britain against which Wilberforce revolted. He portrays a man who, despite his piety, remained an engaging companion and got on with opponents. “He defied the axiom that political careers necessarily end in failure, going to his grave fulfilled by the knowledge of what he had helped to do.”

Wilberforce had his faults: he was sometimes too credulous and trusting towards those in power. His initial hope that ending the slave trade would improve conditions for the slaves proved too optimistic. Even after the British parliament voted to end slavery in 1833, the year Wilberforce died, it continued in the US until the civil war, in Cuba until the 1870s and in Brazil until 1888.

Hague attributes the growth of abolitionism to enlightenment thinking, including that of Adam Smith, who saw it as economically inefficient because it artificially constrained individuals from acting in their own interest. Lest abolition seem too much of a white man’s burden, it is welcome to turn to Richard Reddie’s Abolition!, which emphasises Africans’ own contribution to the struggle, alongside the role of Christianity. Reddie, an African (Caribbean) British subject, is project director of the Churches Together in England campaign to highlight the bicentenary’s significance. While this book is less fluent than Hague’s, its strength lies in its African context. He asserts that: “Africans were largely the agents of their own freedom”. Though this is an exaggeration, he is right to highlight those who fought slavery - the people who resisted on the ships, revolted in the sugar fields or campaigned.

“Men and women such as Nzinga Mbemba of the Congo, King Agaja of Dahomey (modern-day Benin), Nanny and Cudjoe in Jamaica, Cuffy and Quamina Gladstone in Guyana, and Bussa in Barbados. Unlike their European counterparts, these figures tended to be celebrated only in their own countries... This is an oversight because many of these men and women lost their lives in the struggle to bring about African freedom - this could never be said of their equally brave European equivalents.”

Reddie does not shy from Africa’s own history of slavery - both the trans-Saharan trade that took west Africans to the Middle East and beyond (it “predated its transatlantic counterpart by at least seven centuries and matched it for numbers in terms of people trafficked”) and slavery within Africa. He points out, though, that indigenous slaves were treated with greater respect; they kept their names and culture, and it was not uncommon to marry into their host’s family and lose their slave status. He is open, too, about Africans’ role in sup-ply-ing slaves for the transatlantic trade - fuelled by hunger for European goods and guns.

In The Trader, the Owner, the Slave, James Walvin provides engrossing portraits of three individuals at the centre of the slave trade. The best known is John Newton, the trader who became an evangelical preacher and wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace”. He was also crucial in advising Wilberforce not to leave parliament after his religious conversion.

Newton was a profaning, womanising youth who, by his own account, was at one stage enslaved on the African coast. He put his knowledge to use as a skilful slave-ship master between 1748 and 1754 - an arduous task when faced with surly crew and the ever-present danger of slave revolts. In the meantime, he turned to religion. While obsessed with his spiritual journey, he gave little thought to the ethics of the trade he was involved in - a sign of how uncontroversial the business was to Europeans. It was not until 30 years later, with the abolition campaign in full swing, that he was persuaded to speak out against the trade.

Olaudah Equiano was a literate, enterprising slave who eventually bought his freedom and wrote a popular account of his life, becoming a leader of the British campaign for abolition. His tale had many harrowing aspects - he sailed for years with an English ship’s master and acquired money, thought he would be freed when they returned to England, only to find himself sold back into slavery. But it also showed how, as the slave economy matured, it needed skilled workers.

To European eyes, though, the story of Thom-as Thistlewood, a slave owner in Ja-mai-ca, is the most alarming - an example of the degradation to which ordinary men can be led by a cruel system. Arriving from Lincolnshire to seek his fortune, he worked for other sugar planters and then became one himself, though with only modest success.

He quickly learned the punishments needed to keep discipline in an environment where slaves outnumbered whites by more than 10 to one, and added a few bizarre ones of his own. According to his diary he gave one runaway “a moderate whipping, pickled him well, made Hector shit in his mouth, immediately put a gag in whilst his mouth was full & made him wear it 4 or 5 hours”.

Thistlewood is famous for writing in his diary a meticulous account of his rapacious sex life, taking slave women whenever and wherever he pleased: over 37 years, by his account, he had intercourse 3,852 times; in a typical year he had 14 different partners. One slave, Phibbah, became his common-law wife and bore him a son in a relationship that lasted 30 years.

Yet he was also strangely an enlightenment figure, devouring books by David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson and Edward Gibbon. He became an accomplished scientist, botanist and horticulturalist. The enlightenment may have helped create the climate that made abolition possible, but it created some horrifying juxtapositions on the way. The ambivalences that this detestable trade created are something we still live with today.

Brian Groom is the FT’s comment and analysis editor.

William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner

By William Hague

HarperPress £25, 582 pages

FT bookshop price: £20

Abolition!: The Struggle to Abolish Slavery in the British Colonies

By Richard S. Reddie

Lion £9.99, 254 pages

FT bookshop price: £7.99

The Trade, The Owner, The Slave

By James Walvin

Jonathan Cape £17.99, 320 pages

FT bookshop price: £14.39