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 Written by Adam Hochschild Published by Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 2005, ISBN: 0618104690, Hardcover, pp. 468, $39.95 CAN

This book deals with the end of slavery in the British Empire. Several nations had large numbers of slaves, especially the eastern countries on the Atlantic Ocean after the discovery of the New World, and particularly in the Caribbean islands. The largest numbers of slave owners were the British, though the slaves they owned were nearly all outside Britain. If a date has to be set for the beginning of the end of the slave trade in the British Empire, it would be May 22, 1787, when twelve men held a meeting in London, England. They were mostly Quakers, and one of them, Thomas Clarkson, though not a Quaker, was probably the greatest of all the enemies of slavery. Later these men were joined by other great anti-slavery leaders, such as John Newton, Olaudah Equiano Granville Sharp, William Wilberforce, and James Stephen.

British ships went to the northwestern shore of Africa from the slave centres of England (London, Bristol, and Liverpool) and bought men, women, and children from Africans who had captured them for sale. Then the slaves, packed in like sardines, were taken on the long voyage to the Caribbean islands, a large number of them dying on the journey. Once arrived they were subjected to incredibly hard labour, chiefly to provide sugar, rum, coffee, or cotton, for the British public. They were frequently whipped mercilessly, and often killed, by their masters.

Many of the British members of Parliament Owned large numbers of slaves. But especially since the Caribbean was far from England, the average Britisher had little idea of the inhuman life the slaves were forced to live. England, like the rest of the world, took slavery for granted. It presumed it would always exist.

The British anti-slavery group used every means they could think of to alert the British public to the horrible evils permitted under the law. They sent agents all over England. They used whatever anti-slavery speakers they could get, especially former slaves. They handed out brochures by the thousands. They wrote letters to Members of Parliament and eventually got a leading member of Parliament to speak for them. They passed out a very effective picture: the design of a slave-ship ("Brookes") which showed the conditions under which the slaves were transported. They showed the country the handcuffs, the thumbscrews, the leg shackles, and the instruments for prying open slaves' mouths for force-feeding. They published a book which gave a searing eyewitness picture of slave life as it was. They also made it known that almost half the sailors on the slave-ships and in the Royal Navy were there because they were kidnapped by "press gangs," and that their lives also were miserable. They explained that, if the slave trade were done away with, England could still trade with Africa in legitimate goods. One of their most effective accomplishments was the organization of a boycott by thousands of Britishers who stopped buying sugar grown by slaves.

Their work was having an effect; so the slave-owners resorted to lies, claiming even that the slaves were happy. Slave-owners in Parliament either defeated or watered down any motion against slavery.

In the summer of 1791 slaves in the Caribbean country called St. Dominic (today called Haiti) revolted. Haiti is the eastern part of the island which has the Dominican Republic for its western part. St. Dominic, a French possession, had the largest slave population of any Caribbean .country and was the crown jewel of European colonies. It had 500,000 black slaves, 40,000 mulattos, and 40,000 whites. Both blacks and mulattos revolted. The fighting was extremely bitter, but the slaves and mulattos, led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, prevailed. France, surprised and frightened by the turn of events, abolished slavery in St. Dominic in August, 1793, and, indeed in all its colonies in February, 1794. In the French Revolution, France had already declared the "Rights of Man" but had not given any rights to slaves.

In 1793 France and Britain went to war. The British decided to capture St. Dominic but, after five years, were defeated by the slaves' guerilla warfare. Because the English saw what was happening in France itself with its notion of freedom, the abolitionist cause in England suffered a setback. Nevertheless, it kept getting stronger in the minds of ordinary Englishmen, and in 1807 Parliament outlawed the slave trade. This did not emancipate the slaves, however, and the abolitionists knew that they had to proceed by degrees, which they did over the next thirty years. Helped especially by many women's anti-slavery societies under the leadership of a Quaker, Elizabeth Heyrick, and by a slave rebellion in Jamaica, many people became convinced that the price of slavery was too high; on July 31, 1838, England outlawed the ownership of slaves.

This decision had a ripple effect. It opened the way for outlawing slavery in other countries, and it also undermined many other forms of "slavery" at home ; e.g., by legalizing unions, seeking a minimum wage, demanding a wider suffrage, etc. It also led to the eventual adoption of penalties for genocide or other war crimes.

Hochshild is a marvellous writer, as he has proven already in his earlier book on King Leopold of Belgium and the Congo. This is another fascinating and outstanding work.