Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery
by Adam Hochschild
This book came out at the moment when everybody in Britain was marking the bicentenary of the end of the slave trade in 2007. And in some ways I think maybe it took an American, an outsider, to the British story of race, slavery and abolition, to see the central characters afresh. He looked at people like William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson and through their stories re-explored the big, overarching narrative of the rise and fall of British slavery.
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“In all Adam’s books he places character and biography at the very heart of his stories and this is another example of him doing that brilliantly. People are perhaps hard-wired to love story, so putting people at the absolute centre of a narrative is a very powerful way to write. In some ways I think maybe it took an American, an outsider to the British story of race, slavery and abolition, to see these characters afresh. Adam looked again at people like William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson and tried to discover who they were, and through their biographies he explored the bigger, overarching and convoluted story of the rise and ultimate fall of British slavery.” Read more...
The best books on Race and Slavery
David Olusoga, Historian
