Product Description
From the author of the prize-winning King Leopold's Ghost comes a taut, thrilling account of the first grass-roots human rights campaign, which freed hundreds of thousands of slaves around the world.
In 1787, twelve men gathered in a London printing shop to pursue a seemingly impossible goal: ending slavery in the largest empire on earth. Along the way, they would pioneer most of the tools citizen activists still rely on today, from wall posters and mass mailings to boycotts and lapel pins. This talented group combined a hatred of injustice with uncanny skill in promoting their cause. Within five years, more than 300,000 Britons were refusing to eat the chief slave-grown product, sugar; London's smart set was sporting antislavery badges created by Josiah Wedgwood; and the House of Commons had passed the first law banning the slave trade.
However, the House of Lords, where slavery backers were more powerful, voted down the bill. But the crusade refused to die, fueled by remarkable figures like Olaudah Equiano, a brilliant ex-slave who enthralled audiences throughout the British Isles; John Newton, the former slave ship captain who wrote "Amazing Grace"; Granville Sharp, an eccentric musician and self-taught lawyer; and Thomas Clarkson, a fiery organizer who repeatedly crisscrossed Britain on horseback, devoting his life to the cause. He and his fellow activists brought slavery in the British Empire to an end in the 1830s, long before it died in the United States. The only survivor of the printing shop meeting half a century earlier, Clarkson lived to see the day when a slave whip and chains were formally buried in a Jamaican churchyard.
Like Hochschild's classic King Leopold's Ghost, Bury the Chains abounds in atmosphere, high drama, and nuanced portraits of unsung heroes and colorful villains. Again Hochschild gives a little-celebrated historical watershed its due at last.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 34 reviews)

Very engaging history about the abolition of the slave trade

This is a very engaging history about the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire. As author Adam Hochschild retells it, the realization about the evil of slavery came surprisingly quickly in Great Britain in the closing years of the eighteenth century. By the early months of 1787, most inhabitants of Britain (with the exception of the Quakers and very few other people) would have seen the slave trade as something natural, that had occurred in every civilization in human history. By the closing months of that same year, hundred of thousands of Britons had joined a boycott of sugar made in the West Indies plantations. It would take however until 1807 (mainly because of the French revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic wars) to outlaw the slave trade in the British Empire and until the 1830s to outlaw slavery itself (it would take even longer to end slavery in other countries like the Unites States and Brazil, of course) Why this turn of mind happened? Hochschild throws around some hypothesis (the inhabitants of Britain suddenly saw a similarity between slavery and the hated forced enlistments of British subjects into the British navy, he claims) but none of them is entirely convincing. The book is very interesting throughout, focusing on a few characters who become the protagonists of the struggle (like William Wilberforce, a very conservative man in other issues, but a commited if cautious fighter against the slave trade), the radical activist Thomas Clarkson (a man surprisingly modern in some of his beliefs but who could also be very naive), the former slave Olaudah Equiano, the repentant former captain of a slave ship John Newton, the main defender of slavery Banastre Tarleton and prime minister William Pitt (a timid opponent of slavery). And there are also very interesting chapters dealing with the Haitian revolution, the first succesful slave revolt in history.
October 13, 2008

Fabulous Book about the First Activists

Wow. What a book. Well written, focused and full of the kind of historical details that are pertinent to the big picture. The 12 men who gathered in a London bookstore in 1787 unleashed a chain of events that reverberate to this day, including ending slavery throughout the world, giving marginalized people the belief that they could change things, and developing the tools of mass mobilization and media propaganda that are still used today. The moral giant that emerges among a plethora of humanistic titans is Thomas Clarkson, whose tireless and relentless efforts to create anti-slavery sentiment in an empire whose existence most thought depended on that foul institution are nothing short of superhuman. That his legacy has been overshadowed by the likes of William Wilburforce is a testimony to the negative aspects of propagandizing hagiographies at the expense of others. Indeed, Wilburforce, though unquestionably a major force in making the oligarchs in Parliament aware of slavery's horrors, was an inept politician at best, but his biographer offspring did an admirable job in stealing Clarkson's thunder. Hopefully, this book will help set the record straight. The story of this 50 year struggle, which surely must rank as one of the most herculean if not sisyphean of all time, is full of political intrigue, human suffering and the dominoes of history, including the pivotal events in revolutionary France and insurgent Haiti. The British effort to have the slave trade prohibited (1807) and then achieving full emancipation (1838) made American abolitionist struggles a doable goal rather than some idealistic nirvana. Indeed, what those 12 men started in the late 18th century presaged an era when individuals bereft of power could mobilize moral force and social activism to effect change that the entrenched establishment wished to avoid. It is an important story for all those who think that nothing can change in a world of inequity and injustice.
May 22, 2008

the history not taught in British schools

Hochschild's vivid and compelling narrative on the the abolition of the slave trade in 18th century Britain provides insight beyond the period it describes to illuminate events in the present day. The author's stance is that the campaign marked the first mass civic movement in favour of universal human rights. Through the campaign, early stirrings of feminism and trade unionism come to the fore. Wilberforce is somewhat eclipsed in favour of the ill-treated (by history) Thomas Clarkson, whose vision and sheer stamina spearheaded the gruelling contest with the establishment proslavery forces.

And when the establishment is mentioned, you have to ask - could only a non-Brit have written this book? The undignified shambolics of the British monarchy, the arrogance and anti-democratic nature of the House of Lords - elements all too familiar in modern British society, their antecedents laid bare as they struggle against the settled will of the populace to maintain the slave trade. It is incredible to think that these unrepresentative anomalies still fetter British society in the 21st century. Have the Church of England bishops sitting in the House of Lords atoned for the church's slave-owning past? Have British banks and insurers owned up to their guilt?

A minor quibble is the constant use of 'England' and 'Britain' as if they mean the same thing. No doubt the author misconstrues the terms as a result of prolonged exposure to similarly ignorant little Englanders during the course of his research. For an otherwise meticulous historian, the failure to comprehend that there is no such political entity as 'England' after 1707 is regrettable. It is hoped future editions will emend this point.

Both pleasurable and shocking, Bury the Chains should be mandatory reading in British schools. The inequities of the present day sometimes seem unassailable. Clarkson and his contemporaries did not give in to such pessimism, and as a result made the world a better place.

April 02, 2008

"That lump of deformity, the Slave Trade"

"In 1787, approximately three quarters of the people on Earth lived under some form of enslavement, serfdom, debt bondage or indentured servitude. This was the year the popular movement against the British slave trade suddenly ignited. There were no slaves in Britain itself, but the vast majority of its people accepted slavery in the British West Indies as perfectly normal." -- Adam Hochschild in BBC Article

On 25 March 1807, the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act was passed. It was several years after 1807 that slavery actually ended in Great Britain, and it took the collective effort of a dedicated group of reformers, religious leaders, and English politicians to abolish a practice that had enriched the Empire at the expense of countless thousands of lives.

Among the reformers were John Newton, a former English slave ship captain who experienced an epiphany, renounced his evil ways, and wrote the beloved hymn "Amazing Grace" as well as several hundred other hymns. There was also Thomas Clarkson, a wealthy English aristocrat who also experienced a religious conversion and dedicated his life to the abolition of slavery, and William Wilberforce, frequently credited with being the father of the English abolition movement. None of these reformers could have accomplished the enormous undertaking individually.
In "King Leopold's Ghost," Adam Hochschild brilliantly told the story of the rebellion against the Belgian King's egregious human rights violations in the ironically-named "Congo Free State," which was neither free nor a state. In that crusade as well, it took the collective efforts of reformers including E.D. Morel, British Consul Roger Casement, Arthur Conan Doyle and others.
The remarkable thing about these crusades is that they went against the Empire's economic interest. Even steel craftsmen in Sheffield, noted for its knives, cutlasses, leg-irons and other implements used in the slave trade, petitioned Parliament for abolition. At the same time, children were routinely worked fourteen hours a day in English sweatshops, and England was attempting to remove its "criminal class" by sending mostly minor criminals, many of them Irish, to Australia, ten thousand miles away. "Out of Sight, Out of Mind."

This is an important story, well-researched and intelligently written. It clearly deserves five stars.
]Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves
March 07, 2008

change is possible

Beginning in 1555 and lasting for 350 years, the British empire bought, sold, and enslaved about 11 million African people. This required some 35,000 voyages along the so-called triangular trade route: buying slaves from African slave traders along the continent's west coast, depositing their human cargo mainly in the Caribbean to work on Britain's sugar plantations but also to ports from Quebec to Chile, and then returning to England with imports for the empire. At the end of the 18th century slavery was hardly unusual; it was the rule for most peoples and places on earth. What was unusual was that in the space of about fifty years Britain outlawed the slave trade, and then a while later slavery itself (abolition was one thing, genuine emancipation another).

How did the unthinkable happen? How did an economic system that was so deeply embedded, so profitable, and so taken for granted as normal by almost everyone, disappear so swiftly? Hochschild describes the abolition movement as "one of the most ambitious and brilliantly organized citizens's movements of all time." Many of the political means that we enjoy today were perfected back then-- investigative journalism into the real conditions of slave life, sugar boycotts, 519 petitions to the British parliament with 390,000 signatures, public debates, media campaigns, and every day activism. Progressive women's groups far ahead of their time, missionaries (despised by the plantation owners), British evangelicals, Methodists, and especially the culturally marginal Quakers all provided principled moral argument. The herculean efforts of Thomas Clarkson, the parliamentary leadership of William Wilberforce, and the legal advocacy of the eccentric Granville Sharp were essential.

But Hochschild is careful to avoid the paternalism of self-congratulatory, aristocratic benevolence. After all, when all was said and done, it was the slave-owning planters who were reimbursed for their "losses" by the British government and not the slaves. Whenever possible he allows the slaves to speak for themselves, like the remarkable Olaudah Equiano, whose 500-page best-selling autobiography Interesting Narrative provided a first person narrative of what is still considered the best account of slave life (and is still available today); and Quobna Ottobah Cugoano's Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. He describes at great length the numerous slave revolts in which fearless and skilled leaders like Toussaint L'Overture led slaves to free themselves and force the British to face reality, however reluctant they were to do so. In these violent and vicious revolts the most beleaguered people on earth defeated the world's two greatest military powers, France and Britain, in Haiti and Jamaica.

Bury the Chains joins Hochschild's previous book King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1999) about Belgium's plunder of the Congo. The stories are depressing but inspiring, for however dark these histories, however deep our national complicity, the narratives remind us that we are nor fated to accept injustice to our fellow human beings. Whether in Iraq or Darfur, whether with malaria or HIV-AIDS, the abolition of slavery reminds us that effective movements of genuine social justice are possible.
June 21, 2007

SIMILAR PRODUCTS

King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
by Adam Hochschild

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
by Ishmael Beah

Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World
by David Brion Davis

The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin
by Adam Hochschild

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
by Naomi Klein