Adam Hochschild: Bury the Chains

From: Bought at Borders to get context for paper on Atlantic slave literature.
When: Early in Trinity term 2008.
Verdict: Worth Consuming
Fate: Second hand/ Charity.

Hailing from a Northern European country technically speaking more colonized than ever imperialist, I knew very little – shockingly little – about the Atlantic slave trade, and had never been exposed to slave literature in school (it is apparently a common stop on the curriculum in both British and US educations). In fact, I had never heard of it as a genre until it popped up in the Romantics period paper at university.
Since my brain is like a sieve if deprived of historical information to attach the cultural stuff onto, I went to the book store in search of context. There I found this book, which proved so useful, exciting and inspirational that although I had mined it for exams, I decided to read it properly immediately after Finals.

Bury the Chains tells two main stories, and from a PC perspective it could perhaps be construed as a little problematic that its red thread is a "white" story – that of the unrelenting abolitionist activists without whom the cause against slavery would probably have moved much slower. This same story is, on the other hand, the strength of the book: Hochschild takes us back to the roots of the modern political movement and the small group of men (and some women) who basically invented the tools of the mass campaign. The power of a few individuals to change minds on a massive level is convincingly argued and, I believe, the point of the book. The kinds of challenges now faced by humanity require change that many would consider unthinkable – but then so was ending the slave trade, necessary perhaps and morally right, but economically and practically "impossible". Yet, as Hochschild shows, a surprisingly small number of people (both those he chronicles and those he only nods at) changed the minds of the western world in only a generation.


The hard-working Quakers and ardent Anglican campaigners make for an appealing group of heroes, and Hochschild turns on the storyteller to create for the reader a vivid idea especially of family life and customs in England in a time of revolutions. If he fares less well with bringing to life the other story, that of the "Sixty Million and more" to whom Tony Morrison dedicated Beloved, that is also because the reader resists the information. My mind at least recoils at the scale and depth of the torture the slave trade involved: the uprooted millions, the torments of the passage, the cruelty and lawlessness of the majority of slave owners, the economical structures that made it all possible. (The same out-of-sight-out-of-mind-mechanic which of course enables us to be blind to slavery today).

There is nothing pleasant about reading those harrowing sequences, whereas it is very pleasant indeed to read about Granville Sharp's family orchestra in a barge on the Thames, and this places an uncomfortable imbalance at the heart of the book. For a reader like me, though, who came to the topic with only scant information, there is more than enough on conditions, practices and policies to feel that I now have at least some idea of the atrocities – if only on a level primarily useful as general background for, say, the US elections or news from Haiti.

Hochschild uses sources – legal and literary, journals and eye-witness reports – to fluently aid his description, but few of the slaves whose names are now remembered lived long enough to get to stay with the narrative for the many decades it covers. The "celebrities", as it were, are there, of course, and this is not at all a bad book to read for context on a writer like Olaudah Equiano (in some editions of his work known by his slave name of Gustavus Vassa). Hochschild does what he can with the available material, but inevitably, the panorama is one of blacks who struggle for their lives and lose, and whites who struggle against the system and ultimately prevail.

Knowing a fair deal about the period and, by the time I returned to the book, about British slave literature, I sometimes felt that the way Hoschschild presented especially literary sources was imprecise. I found myself going "Yes, that's true, but on you should also say…" – but I guess this is how all popular history works, and true by necessity of any work this wide in scope. Bury the Chains served my purpose very well and I recommend it as an introduction to the topic of slavery and abolition. That it is also an inspirational read for anyone wishing to change the world is an added bonus.


OK, I know you wanna see a picture of the Sharp Family Orchestra on their barge, and naturally my favourite museum, the National Portrait Gallery, has one.

Buy Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery on Amazon.


PS. I'm pretty sure I still have another book by Hochschild, in Swedish - Kung Leopold's Vålnad (King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism), an award-winning bestseller on atrocities and eccentricities in colonial Congo. Having narrowly avoided having it sent to me from the historical book club, I succumbed in the same year when the hard cover was cheap at the sale of the student book store at the Frescati campus of Stockholm University. Now I quite hope I haven't given it away; if Hochschild's formula is mixing "Greed, Terror and Heroism" I already know it'll be both thought-provoking and a good read.