Fifty Books Project 2023

Bury The Chains:  Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves by Adam Hochschild

 

Hochschild is a former journalist (he co-founded Mother Jones magazine) turned historian who has made a career of producing wonderfully readable books about giant, complex topics – from the oppressive exploitation of the Belgian Congo to the Spanish Civil War.  He has a gift for building a large narrative out of small anecdotes in a way that enlightens aspects of history that have been overlooked.  This is his 2005 history of the emancipation movement in Great Britain.  While it is long and dense, it reads like a great novel, weaving together the stories of dozens of people almost lost to history who dedicated their lives to eliminating first the British Slave trade and then slavery in the British colonies of the West Indies.

 

Hochschild begins by exploring the ubiquity, size and economic value of the slave trade – observing that in 1800 “well over three quarters of all people alive were in bondage of one kind or another.”  Focusing on the Atlantic slave trade, Hochschild gives a clear picture of its size and complexity – with hundreds of British ships plying the west coast of Africa, buying and transporting across the middle passage some 40,000 people every year.  The trade in humans is driven by what he refers to as “the Middle East of the late eighteenth century” – Europe’s insatiable desire for West Indian sugar, with Great Britain importing over 6 million gallons a year, so that British trade with Jamaica alone was worth more than that with the 13 North American colonies.

 

In part because of this size and value, there was little discussion of the morality of the slave trade until the spring of 1787 when Thomas Clarkson – a young minister in the Church of England (which itself owned several West Indian sugar plantations and hundreds of slaves) – organized a meeting of 12 like-minded men who formed the first abolitionist society in Great Britain.  Most of these men were Quakers who had been theoretically opposed to slavery for some time, and one of them was Olaudah Equiano – a formerly enslaved man who would go on to write the first great slave narrative.  At the time there was no organized opposition to slavery or the slave trade and British politics did not include ways for popular social movements to be translated into legislation.

 

Much of Hochschild’s story centers of the building of the movement for the abolition of the slave trade. In Great Britain, abolitionists wanted to end the trade, emancipationists wanted to end slavery itself.  Hochschild makes clear that there were very few emancipationists, even at that first meeting.  Slavery itself seemed to be a given, it was the cruelty of the slave trade that awakened consciences.  While their aims were limited, the movement spent much of its time developing means rather than debating ends.  Hochschild recounts how virtually every tactic prominent in social justice campaigns today got its start with this movement to ban the slave trade:  they gathered information, produced pamphlets, held rallies, designed and distributed buttons and posters, organized boycotts and distributed petitions that they sent on to Parliament (hundreds of times, with thousands of signatures).  What Clarkson, Equiano, Granville Sharp and William Wilberforce (the MP who made abolition his primary cause through a long and illustrious career) uncovered was a well of previously hidden opposition to the trade.  The emerging industrial centers of Manchester and Birmingham became great sources of support as the factory workers developed an understanding of oppression.  Even cities heavily dependent on the trade – Liverpool and London – developed pockets of support for abolition.

 

The history of their success is long and complicated – it involves the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, The Maroon uprising in Jamaica, the development of women’s social justice groups and the long fight to reform and democratize Parliament as well as concerted organizing and political pressure over twenty years for the trade to be ended and another thirty for emancipation.

 

Along the way we get portraits of the principal activists as well as George III, his son the Duke of Clarence (later George IV), Tousaint L’Ouverture, early feminist activist Elizabeth Heyrick and learn of Elizabeth Barrett Brownings connection to the slave trade and William Blake’s work to end it.  There are fascinating side anecdotes about printing and the Louisiana Purchase along with abundant stories establishing the brutality of slavery and of the wars fought to put down slave uprisings.  I expect that most American readers of this will come away with a significantly more complex view of the slave trade, as well as a certain discomfort with the fact that the United States never developed an emancipation movement nearly as powerful or successful as Great Britain’s.