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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #46615 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

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• ISBN13: 9780618619078
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
"Men from England bought and sold me,/ Paid my price in paltry gold;/ But, though theirs they have enroll'd me,/ Minds are never to be sold." So went "The Negro's Complaint" by noted 18th-century poet William Cowper—written, says Hochschild, as an op-ed piece would be today, to spread the message of England's fledgling movement to abolish the slave trade. Hochschild, whose last book, King Leopold's Ghost, was a stunning account of the ravages perpetrated by Belgium on the Congo, turns to a more edifying but no less amazing tale: the rich, complex history of a movement that began with just 12 angry men meeting in a printer's shop in London in 1787 and, within a century, had led to the virtual disappearance of slavery.The men who met in James Phillips's print shop included Quakers, Evangelical Anglicans and a young Cambridge graduate who had had an epiphany about the evils of slavery while on the road to London. The last, Thomas Clarkson, became an indefatigable organizer, carrying out the first modern-style investigation into human rights abuses. Granville Sharp was an eccentric but socially respected man of progressive ideas who dreamed of founding a colony of free blacks in Africa. Within a short time these men and their colleagues had created a mass movement that included the first boycott, in which hundreds of thousands of Britons, chiefly women, refused to buy slave-made sugar from the Caribbean; petitions from all over the country flooded into Parliament; and a mass-produced drawing of a slaver's lower deck, showing where the slaves were densely crowded for the middle passage, became the first iconic image of human oppression.Hochschild tells of this campaign with verve, style and humor, but without preaching or moralizing, letting the horrific facts of slavery in the Caribbean (far more brutal than in the American South) speak for themselves. And he refuses to make saints out of the activists; while highlighting bravery in the face of death threats and physical violence by promoters of slavery, the author equally points out their foibles and failings, and the often ironic unintended consequences of their actions. Along the way, Hochschild illuminates how Britain's economy was dependent upon the slave trade, why England's civil society was particularly hospitable to a movement to abolish that trade, and the impact on the movement of the French Revolution and the particularly bloody slave uprising in French St. Domingue (today's Haiti). It's a brilliantly told tale, at once horrifying and pleasurable to read. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
Hochschild's history of British abolitionism notes that ending slavery would have seemed as unlikely in eighteenth-century England as banning automobiles does today. Despite the "latent feeling" among intellectuals that slavery was barbarous, Caribbean sugar plantations were seen as a necessary part of the economy. Prefiguring many social movements to come, the anti-slavery crusade was driven by the partnership between a committed activist, Thomas Clarkson, and a connected politician, William Wilberforce. It was Clarkson and his Quaker associates who pioneered the use of petitions, eyewitness accounts, and even an early, innocent form of direct-mail solicitation. Hochschild argues that the violent techniques of naval press gangs primed England's populace to consider the plight of the slaves. His capacious narrative is both disturbing and fascinating, and not without its ironies: when Parliament finally did abolish slavery, in 1833, plantation owners were generously compensated for their loss of "property."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

From The Washington Post
Often, outrage is not enough. If campaigns to end injustices have succeeded, it is because they have been thought through, built well, fought hard. In our lifetimes, we have seen great strides in the effort to end child labor, segregation and apartheid; we have seen real gains in the battles for women's rights, consumer safeguards and environmental protections. But successful movements require more than the audacity to try to right a wrong, especially when that wrong is pervasive, widely accepted and underpins a vast economic enterprise. They succeed because of organizational savvy. The granddaddy of these transforming citizens' crusades, and the one that altered perhaps the most amazingly unjust and savage institution of all, was the British movement to end the international slave trade.

Adam Hochschild's wonderful, vivid new Bury the Chains argues, in part, that the British abolition movement of the late 1700s pioneered the strategies that every activist group now takes for granted: direct mailings, legal test cases, campaign pins, grassroots lobbying. "Each of these tools, from the poster to the political book tour, from the consumer boycott to investigative reporting designed to stir people to action, is part of what we take for granted in a democracy," Hochschild writes. "Two and a half centuries ago, few people assumed this."

Fascinating as this is, what makes Hochschild's book so readable is the rich cast of characters who created the movement, and the appalling nature of slavery itself. This isn't just any social movement, and the reader can't help but share the mingled sense of outrage and disbelief that the abolitionists themselves must have felt as they witnessed or heard about the incredible inhumanity of this practice.

Hochschild, a founder of Mother Jones magazine and the author of several books, including King Leopold's Ghost, begins his story with the May 22, 1787, meeting of a dozen men in a print shop in London -- a time when roughly three-quarters of humanity lived in some sort of bondage, be it slavery, serfdom or indentured servitude. Every year, nearly 80,000 Africans were captured, shackled and loaded onto slave ships bound for the New World. Most British leaders and citizens accepted the system as necessary to sustain the economy of British colonies in the West Indies and of port cities in the United Kingdom itself; slavery's advocates said that without the institution, the price of sugar would soar. Few Britons evidenced much thought or distress about the morality of slavery. Even the Church of England owned a plantation where slaves were branded and mistreated. "If, early that year, you had stood on a London street corner and insisted that slavery was morally wrong and should be stopped," Hochschild writes, "nine out of ten listeners would have laughed you off as a crackpot." Yet within a few years, the abolitionists had established committees in every major town, rallied 300,000 Britons to support a boycott of slave-grown sugar and flooded Parliament with petitions to end slavery.

As with many activist movements, the catalysts for this one often came from the oddest places. One was an insurance dispute. An inexperienced slave-ship captain, his boat overcrowded with slaves and sailors and alternately becalmed and beset by headwinds, lost his way en route to the West Indies. The slaves began to die, and their corpses would bring the captain no profit. Then he realized that since slaves were considered cargo, they could be jettisoned if conditions at sea required. So he decided to throw 132 still-living slaves overboard, let them drown and collect insurance money for them. But his insurance company, for mercenary (not moral) reasons of its own, said it wasn't liable. The dispute led to a trial over money, not murder. One of those in attendance was a lawyer named Granville Sharp, who at age 32 had become the leading defender of black rights in London after meeting a severely beaten black man being treated by Sharp's brother, a physician. Sharp became one of the leading pamphleteers of the abolition movement and began to prick the sleeping conscience of England.

The ripples from the insurance trial began to wash over British society. One of Sharp's indignant pamphlets wound up in the hands of a minister who later became head of Cambridge University. Once there, he set a question for the university's prestigious Latin essay contest: Is it lawful to enslave others against their will? The contest's winner, a tall, red-headed divinity student named Thomas Clarkson, became overwhelmed with revulsion while researching his essay. After the contest, as he galloped toward London on his way to a promising career in the Church of England, he paused, dismounted and sat by the side of the road. There he resolved that "it was time someone should see these calamities to their end." He went on to become one of the abolition movement's boldest leaders.

Nor is Clarkson even the most colorful in Hochschild's roster. There's also John Newton, a slave-ship captain who became an evangelical preacher and wrote the song "Amazing Grace"; a former slave named Olaudah Equaino, who wrote movingly about being captured and about the wretched conditions on slave ships; the publisher James Phillips, who connected Clarkson and Sharp with a Quaker network that provided the backbone of the abolitionist organization; and Wilbur Wilberforce, the eloquent, evangelical member of the House of Commons who became the abolitionists' greatest ally in Parliament.

Just as in U.S. reform movements from abolition to temperance, the pervasiveness of evangelicals in the British anti-slavery movement was no coincidence; evangelicalism was spreading at the time among Anglicans, who were reacting against a whole raft of immorality and licentiousness -- from public executions, prostitution, pubs and pickpockets to the lack of dignity shown by representatives in Parliament. "To evangelicals," Hochschild writes, "this was a nation that had lost its moral bearings."

Nowhere was that lost moral compass clearer than with regard to slavery. Hochschild's ragged band of abolitionists, often armed with little more than their own ingenuity and moral suasion, went up against one of the great evils of the 18th or any other century. Bury the Chains features a stunning portrait of the sheer brutality of the slave trade and the British plantation system in the West Indies. On slave ships, kidnapped Africans were packed in rows in a 2'8"-high space, according to the intrepid Clarkson, who took measurements (and may have missed a calling as a brilliant investigative reporter). According to one captain's log that Clarkson examined, 20 percent of slaves died on the voyage from Africa. The trips were perilous for the crews, too: Another captain lost 32 sailors in a single voyage. Once in the West Indies, slaves died so regularly in hazardous working conditions -- unsafe machinery in the mills where the sugar cane was crushed, or dangerous cauldrons where the cane juice was boiled -- that the plantations relied on new shipments of slaves to keep their work force constant. Rebels were treated harshly; some were burned alive, others shot.

In one particularly nightmarish section, Hochschild details the atrocities that accompanied the fighting after a rebellion against slavery broke out in August 1791 on what is now Haiti. Hochschild grippingly describes a series of war crimes by all sides -- the rebels, the French and the British, who briefly seized the island -- that would make today's Iraqi insurgents blush. One French general ordered a Haitian rebel leader's epaulets nailed to his shoulders -- in front of his wife and children, who were then drowned before the suffering rebel's eyes. The same general also packed Haitian prisoners into a ship's hold and burned sulfur throughout the night, thereby creating "what may have been history's first gas chamber."

These harrowing passages show what the abolitionists were up against: an appalling institution and its appalling consequences. And yet, after the costly war in the West Indies, Lord Grenville, a new prime minister who was more sympathetic to the abolitionists, guided a bill abolishing the entire British slave trade through Parliament in early 1807. Full emancipation for the empire's slaves, however, did not come until 1833.

That's still an astonishing achievement, and Hochschild believes the British abolitionists can provide inspiration for people today. "Their passion and optimism are still contagious and still relevant to our times, when, in so many parts of the world, equal rights for all men and women seem far distant," he writes. In a few paragraphs, Hochschild draws a parallel between the struggle of the abolitionists and current campaigns to improve working conditions and end child labor in developing countries. If those issues seem distant to many Americans, he writes, remember that slavery seemed distant to most British citizens who nonetheless consumed the sugar that slaves produced in that dawn of globalization.

Hochschild's riveting narrative reminds us that people who fancy themselves civilized can have the most uncivilized institutions, that distance can lull a society into living with terrible injustices, and that economic interests can corrupt the moral fabric of a nation. Hochschild laments the absence of a sign or plaque to mark the place in London where the abolition movement began. The dedicated members of that campaign surely deserve a monument; until then, they have this splendid book.

Reviewed by Steven Mufson
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

The struggle for abolition in the British Empire
Bury the Chains recounts the story of the struggle for abolition in the British Empire. Author Adam Hochschild, concentrates on the fifty-year period leading up to the eventual emancipation throughout the British possessions in 1838. Hochschild's recent work King Leopold's Ghost also covered the topic of indigenous peoples oppressed by imperialist Europeans.

Starting in 1787 the work covers the efforts of a group of 12 men and those they inspired to work towards the abolition of the Slave Trade. During this time, Parliament was always a step behind popular opinion, which grew increasingly more anti-slavery with each passing year. It was not until Parliament itself was reformed in the 1830s that the necessary legislation could be passed to reflect the sentiment of the nation.

The book highlights many of the activists whose names have become footnotes to History. Olaudah Equiano was a freed slave who worked all his life to better the plight of Africans. His autobiography was a bestseller in its day and helped to spread the idea that Blacks could succeed as freemen. Granville Sharp, a musician, used his vast family connections to keep the issue in the public eye for decades. James Somerset sought his freedom in a landmark trial in 1772, which declared that all slaves were free once they came to England. An Anglican minister, Thomas Clarkson, worked for decades with politician William Wilberforce to show the evils of the slave trade.

Anti-Slavery activists created a public relations campaign that would seem right at home to the modern reader. Buttons, pins, posters, book tour, and other PR techniques were employed to win over the minds of the population. Clarkson developed a display of the shackles used by owners and toured through England and Scotland. The `Middle Passage' route, which carried slaves to their new homes in the West Indies, was made infamous by diagrams showing the crowded holds and high death rates.

The struggle had many success and as many, or more, failures. A model colony was set up in Africa to demonstrate the economic advantages to be gained by exploitation of the land and not the people. The climate and soil proved inhospitable to the European crops and the local tribes were hostile to efforts that would damage their trade with the Europeans. In the end, many of the colonists were reduced to working for the slave traders to avoid starvation.

The French Revolution seemed to offer the promise of freedom to those in bondage in French colonies. Many of the early supporters of the French Revolution felt it to be a decisive turning point in the Abolition movement. Within a few years, however, French Slave ships sailed again with ironic names like "Fraternite", "Egalite", and "Liberte". Napoleon's forces put down a slave revolt lead by Toussaint L'Ouverture but were forced eventually to withdraw his troops from the Island of St. Domingue. The loss of the island was a factor influencing Napoleon to sell the Louisiana Territory to Thomas Jefferson.

It was not until 1807 that the slave trade itself was banned by Parliament. It took another thirty years of work by the abolitionist movement, as well as reform of the electorate, before slaves in the West Indies were freed. By the time of emancipation, only one of the original twelve who started the movement was alive.

Created as a popular history, Bury the Chains is well written and fascinating. The general reader will find it to contain a good narrative filled with interesting events and memorable characters. The academic user will find the lack of footnotes in the text dismaying but all quotes and sources are well documented at the end of the book. The author uses both primary and secondary sources especially recent works such as journal articles and collections of primary documents. This book tells a remarkable story and it tells it remarkably well.

Good but not great
This is a well-written, readable account of the British movement to end the trade in slaves. Hochschild argues, with justification, that this movement was in some ways the template for all future political movements, complete with newsletters, buttons, and boycotts. The main weakness of the book, in my view, is its failure to appreciate the transatlantic nature of the anti-slavery movement in the late 18th and early 19th century. Hochschild mentions only a few American antislavery advocates (curiously including Jefferson in his list); he fails to mention John Jay (who served as first president of the New York Manumussion Society from 1784 onwards) and Alexander Hamilton (another member of the NY Manumussion Society and proponent during the Revolution of a scheme to enlist blacks in the army and "give them their freedom with their muskets.") Anthony Benezet, whose antislavery pamphlets preceded and indeed guided the British, is given a brief mention. Those interested in the US side of the story could consult Ron Chernow's book on Alexander Hamilton or my new biography of John Jay, set to appear in March, as well as more specialized works such as Zilversmit, First Emancipation.

Wonderful writing, with some obvious bias
Hochschild has written a compelling, provocative book that I heartily enjoyed. In addition to good narratives and compelling anecdotes, he shines as he tries to make the social conventions and economic realities of the time period comprehensible today.
Mr. Hochschild is of the opinion that Wilberforce has received way too much credit for what was in reality a broad-based, complex movement of many decades. I have no problem with this and I respect his research and credentials. But he does seem to have an ax to grind with Christianity. No, I am not someone naive enough to hold that Christians can do/ have not done any wrong. But while Hochschild sometimes go to great lengths to make the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries comprehensible, he does not make this same effort for the Christians of that era.
Most notably, he singles out John Newton, author of Amazing Grace, for withering commentary. While I am not here to defend John Newton or assert he had no blind spots (like so many people of his day), I do think Mr. Hochschild trashes him unfairly. Christianity is not an instantaneous transformation but a lifelong process. The fact that John Newton left the slave trade, became a pastor but did not become a leader in the abolition movement somehow is incomprehensible to the author who infers that Newton's religion was a blind and hypocritical sham. This is most glaring sore point in an otherwise wonderful book that I am very glad to have read.