SIVACRACY.NET: Review of "Bury the Chains"

A brief review of Adam Hochschild's "Bury the Chains," can be found at Salon.com here as part of an interview with the author. Below is an excerpt:

"One of the great pleasures of reading history is being introduced to a new date, a day in the life of the past that helped shape who we are today. Adam Hochschild's new book, "Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves," begins on May 22, 1787, when a dozen men met in a printing shop in London. They were trying to figure out how to persuade the rest of the country that slavery, a system that had been the norm for hundreds of years, was morally wrong. The meeting marked the beginning of British abolitionism, the first real human rights campaign and what would become the template for the activist movements that followed it. There was no precedent for what they set out to do, and yet, within 51 years, this group managed to eradicate slavery from the largest colonial empire in the world.

"Hochschild chronicles the movement over that half-century, from the printing shop meeting to the eve of emancipation, when a group of slaves in Jamaica threw their shackles into a coffin and, quite literally, buried the chains. Between these events were spirited fights in Parliament and pamphleteering campaigns and lectures to edify the public. There was the first real mass boycott (excluding the Boston Tea Party), in which women employed in the domestic realm refused to buy slave-grown sugar, and fringe religious movements challenged the authority of the (slave-owning) Church of England. Add to this the waves of bloody slave revolts in the West Indies, and you begin to have a series of events of which Alexis de Tocqueville pronounced: "If you pore over the histories of all peoples, I doubt you will find anything more extraordinary."

"Bury the Chains" starts by marveling at that extraordinariness and then setting to the task of uncovering the hows and whys of it, focusing the story on the key activists involved. But the process of abolition, Hochschild writes, was "a ragged and untidy epic," and his book reflects that untidiness. Teeming with anecdotes and incidents in several countries, filled with characters who pop up for a few paragraphs only to disappear from the story until years later, "Bury the Chains" isn't the smoothest read, but it is amazingly thorough. Rather than simply inform, Hochschild makes it his duty to impress upon the reader just how many people, ideas and tactics the abolition movement needed to be successful. It's a worthy reminder of the effort it takes to change the world."