Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves
Files
Document Type
Book
Description
An account of the first great human rights crusade, which originated in England in the 1780s and resulted in the freeing of hundreds of thousands of slaves around the world. In 1787, twelve men gathered in a London printing shop to pursue a seemingly impossible goal: ending slavery in the largest empire on earth. Along the way, they would pioneer most of the tools citizen activists still rely on today, from wall posters and mass mailings to boycotts and lapel pins. Within five years, more than 300,000 Britons were refusing to eat the chief slave-grown product, sugar; London's smart set was sporting antislavery badges created by Josiah Wedgwood; and the House of Commons had passed the first law banning the slave trade. The activists brought slavery in the British Empire to an end in the 1830s, long before it died in the United States.
Publication Date
2005
Publisher
Houghton Mifflin
City
Boston
State
MA
Award
2006 Nonfiction Runner-Up
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities | Creative Writing | History | Nonfiction
Repository Citation
Hochschild , A. (2005). Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
