1 of 3
The late 18th- and early 19th-century campaign to end slavery in the British Empire, Adam Hochschild argues, "forged virtually every important tool used by citizens' movements in democratic countries today." He concludes: these abolitionists knew that "the way to stir men and women to action is not by biblical argument, but through the vivid, unforgettable description of acts of great injustice done to their fellow human beings."
Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves
|
Half right. Bury the Chains is indeed a riveting history of the British anti-slavery movement. Beginning in 1787 with a London meeting of twelve men resolved to challenge English participation in the slave trade, the movement swept across much of England. In Manchester ten thousand residents signed a petition in opposition to the trade only a few months after that initial meeting; the next year's Parliament received 103 petitions representing up to 100,000 people. The early days of the French revolution furthered the cause. (Lafayette, hero of the American Revolutionary war and then mayor of Paris, had already freed his own slaves in French Guiana.) At the same time, Oladuah Equiano, the first former slave to enter the debate, toured England promoting his bestselling autobiography, a searing depiction of West Indian slavery. By 1791, hundreds of thousands of anti-slavery women in Britain had coordinated one of the world's first boycotts, of sugar produced by West Indian slaves.
Horror at the turn taken by the French revolution in the 1790s and looming Anglo-French military conflict reversed this momentum. "War fever," Hochschild dubiously claims, "is always the enemy of social reform." Regardless, West Indian planters hired lobbyists to press a defense of slavery in the press and the halls of Parliament, and mobilized as pro-slavery spokesmen leaders in port cities, such as Liverpool, dependent on the trade. Massive slave revolts in both the French (Haiti) and British (Jamaica) West Indies in the 1790s, and the bloody wars that ensued, hardened Parliamentary resistance. (More British soldiers lost their lives during the West Indian campaign than during the American Revolution.) Only in 1807 did anti-slavery activists manage to persuade Parliament to ban British participation in the slave trade. And only in 1833 did Parliament vote in favor of slave emancipation, with the proviso that twenty million pounds (40 percent of the national budget) be sent to slaveholders as compensation.
David Brion Davis, Seymour Drescher, and other historians of this epoch plowed much of the initial scholarly ground, as Hochschild generously acknowledges, but even veterans familiar with this literature will benefit from Hochschild's integration of the Haitian and Jamaican story into a history usually dominated by the activities of European and American reformers. Hochschild teaches writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. If his students absorb the deft prose on display in Bury My Chains, we can be optimistic about the literary future of the American press.
The interpretive frame is less satisfactory. Michael Ignatieff recently described the anti-slavery movement as the first global human rights campaign, and Hochschild rushes to bolster this claim. He wishes his readers to absorb the "contagious" passion and optimism of these reformers, since even now, "in so many parts of the world, equal rights for all men and women seem far distant." "From their successful crusade," he solemnly instructs us, "we still have much to learn."
share this page
RSS Feed
