History: 'Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world," said the anthropologist Margaret Mead. "Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." If ever a story confirmed the truth of this aphorism, then it is the one magnificently told by Adam Hochschild in Bury the Chains, writes Richard Aldous
The band of 12 citizens in question, led by a young Anglican deacon, Thomas Clarkson, met in a London print shop on May 22nd, 1787. Their mission was to abolish slavery and the slave trade throughout the British Empire. It took more than half a century, but in the end, they really did change the world. When the ban on slavery came into effect in 1838, everywhere felt it "like an earthquake" said John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the US.
Life for slaves within the British Empire was unremittingly bleak. When slavery ended decades later in the United States, some 400,000 imported Africans had grown to a population of around four million; in the British West Indies, two million imported slaves left a surviving population of only 670,000. The principal reason for this was sugar, by far the hardest, but also most lucrative, crop to cultivate.
If slaves survived a marshy climate dense with mosquitoes, their reward was the monstrous work of harvesting and refining the crop. They carried heavy cane to the mill, fed each bundle through vast rollers that squeezed out the juice into large copper vats in the boiling house. Exhausted slaves often fell into the vats. Mill rollers, which had no brakes, were lethal. One Barbados planter recorded the death of two slaves chained together. "One of them unfortunately reaching too near the rollers, her fingers were caught between them, and her body was drawn through the mill," he wrote airily. "The iron chain, being seized by the rollers, was likewise drawn through & the other female Negro was dragged so close to those cylinders that her head was severed from her body."
Similar horrific stories inspired Clarkson to declare that he would "see these calamities to their end". He became, in the words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the "moral steam engine" of the anti-slavery crusade and identified its civic voice, MP William Wilberforce. Together they employed strikingly modern methods to turn parliamentary opinion. Not the least of these was a highly effective sugar boycott that symbolised public outrage in an age when most did not have the vote.
After abolition they successfully campaigned to ensure that the bans on slavery and the slave trade were vigorously policed. British warships stopped and boarded vessels all over the Atlantic to search for illegal slaves. As much as a third of Royal Navy resources would be involved in these operations. In the end it was military force working hand in hand with moral pressure that brought the trade in slaves to a halt.
Hochschild is brilliant on the tenaciousness of Clarkson and his supporters, not least in fighting inch by inch to erode the self-serving apathy of the "do-nothing" brigade. Take the example of the Codrington sugar plantation in Barbados. It was a typically brutal place to work, with scaldings, beatings, and high mortality rates. The absentee owner of Codrington was the Church of England, specifically its missionary arm, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. (The estate's brand - "Society" - was burned onto the chests of all slaves with a red-hot iron.) In 1760, the Archbishop of Canterbury finally noticed the high death rates on the plantation. "Surely this proceeds from some defect, both of humanity and even good policy," he wrote to a fellow bishop. But no hurry, he added. "We must take things as they are at present." It was always going to take a "moral steam engine" to crash through that level of complacency.
In other hands, this tale of the crusade against slavery might have made worthy but grim reading. But the prize winning author of King Leopold's Ghost has produced another enthralling book to reaffirm a message as resonant now as then: that committed idealism can break the chains of tyranny, cruelty and oppression.
Richard Aldous teaches international history at UCD. His Macmillan, Eisenhower and the Cold War is due from Four Courts Press in May
Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery. By Adam Hochschild, Macmillan, 467pp. £20