Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves.

Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves. By Adam Hochschild (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. xi plus 468pp.).

With Bury the Chains, Adam Hochschild presents the first narrative history of the British antislavery movement in more than a generation. Where others have focused on particular moments, individuals, or themes, Hochschild tells the whole story, from beginning to end, from the institution of organized abolitionism in 1787 through the emancipation of slaves in the British Empire in 1833. The account turns on crisp and compelling portraits of the agitators, from the familiar to the comparatively obscure. The retired slave ship captain Alexander Falconbridge, the Quaker activist Elizabeth Heyrick, and the enslaved Jamaica preacher Samuel Sharpe, receive their due alongside John Newton, Granville Sharp, Olaudah Equiano, Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce, and James Stephen. Yet, Bury the Chains is less a celebration of great men and women than an appreciation of the great things that idealistic but flawed men and women tried to do. For those who want to know the story, or want to teach it, this book will stand as the most complete and most accessible account for some time to come.

Those familiar with the history, however, will find few surprises. Hochschild begins with a brief sketch of slavery and the slave trade in the eighteenth century British Empire. He then turns to the formation of the antislavery campaign in England, from the advocacy of Granville Sharp in the Somerset Case of 1772 through the founding of the Sierra Leone settlement and the formation of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787. Here, and hereafter, Thomas Clarkson becomes "the central character." (4) Hochschild treats Clarkson's sixty years of organizing, lobbying, strategizing, and publishing with justifiable admiration. At the same time, he keeps Clarkson, and the other abolitionists, in proper perspective. Economical descriptions of British culture, politics, and society make the contexts clear. Hochschild devotes four chapters to "the bleak decade" from 1792 to 1802, when the antislavery campaign fell victim to the imperatives of war against revolutionary France and slave insurrection in Saint Domingue. He explains slave trade abolition in 1807 and emancipation in 1833 as the consequences of peculiar moments in British politics and as reactions to specific events in the French and British Caribbean, and not as the product of determined activism alone. Bury the Chains represents a brilliant distillation of the most recent generation of scholarly research.

Still, inevitably, parts of the book work better than others. Some of the problems follow from the limits of the biographical approach. In the opening chapters, Hochschild's anecdotal style does not quite capture the structure of the Atlantic slave system or how the British slave trade typically worked. Although the reader needs to know what made the abolitionists tick, the recurrent attention to their romantic lives, if entertaining, sometimes descends into silliness. More serious is the neglect of North American precedents. One would never know from Bury the Chains that antislavery movements, of a kind, already had developed in revolutionary America, a decade before the British campaign took shape. The impact of American Quaker lobbying on the first abolitionists in England scarcely registers. Incredibly, the consequential and voluminous writings of the Pennsylvanian activist Anthony Benezet draw no mention at all.

If Bury the Chains falls short in its treatment of origins, it works much better as an interpretation of the abolitionists' achievements. Hochschild puts back on the agenda the truly important question of why so many from the middling and working classes found antislavery compelling. And, correctly, he seeks the answer in the lives British men and women lived, as much as in the ideologies they embraced. The British knew themselves to be free, and yet they stood in constant fear of a loss of liberties and rights, an impulse that led British workers to sympathize "with slaves who had none." (221) Bury the Chains, moreover, is the first account of the British antislavery movement to assign the Haitian Revolution the importance it deserves. The slave uprising in Saint Domingue, and the consequent annihilation of colonial wealth, power and lives, ruined the prospects for the antislavery movement in England for more than a decade. At the same time, though, in Hochschild's telling, the Haitian Revolution also effected a permanent change in how the British thought about overseas slaving. Veterans of the disastrous and wasteful five-year campaign to suppress the slave rebellion returned to England convinced that the slave trade did more harm than good, that the importation of African captives produced inherently unstable societies. Those reports and those experiences, Hochschild proposes, figured importantly in the impulse to abolish the slave trade in 1807. Years later, in a similar way, the memory of Saint Domingue led even the most moderate reformers to argue in the early 1830s, in the midst of slave unrest in Jamaica, that if Parliament did not abolish slavery soon than the enslaved would do it for them.

The most stunning departure, though, lies in what Hochschild elects to avoid. This is the first history of British antislavery to refuse even a passing nod to the writings of Eric Williams, whose Capitalism and Slavery has served as a touchstone for academic work on this subject since 1944. This is a choice and not an oversight. Hochschild knows the literature thoroughly. Nor does this necessarily indicate contempt for what Williams wrote, since Bury the Chains absorbs and endorses some of his more important suggestions, on the importance of slave revolts most notably. This silence on the "antislavery debate" serves instead as a declaration of independence from the questions that have agitated scholars for more than two generations. Hochschild is less interested in how we might judge the abolitionists than in what we might learn from them. In their commitment to righting the most intractable wrongs, there is a model to emulate, even as we acknowledge the limits of their vision. What Bury the Chains lacks in theoretical sophistication it makes up for in its enthusiasm for a dedication to social justice.

Christopher Leslie Brown

Rutgers University