Bury the Chains Quotes

“once awakened, a sense of justice is something not easily contained. It often crosses the boundaries of race, class, and gender.”
― Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets & Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves

“That Newton shuddered now [at slavery] is a testimony to they way a strong social movement can awaken a conscience..”
― Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves

“Britain sent more soldiers to the West Indian campaign than it did to suppress the North American rebels two decades earlier, and the war cost far more lives.”
― Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets & Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves

“He produced the first printed catalogue of ceramics and gave each new line of products an aura of desirability through a by-invitation-only opening in his London showroom. Nearly two centuries before Hollywood discovered “product placement,” he arranged for his vases to appear in works by well-known painters.”
― Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets & Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves

“between 1660 and 1807, ships brought well over three times as many Africans across the ocean to British colonies as they did Europeans.”
― Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets & Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves

“At the end of the eighteenth century, well over three quarters of all people alive were in bondage of one kind or another, not the captivity of striped prison uniforms, but of various systems”
― Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets & Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves

“A sense of rights can be contagious,”
― Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets & Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves

“What foreigners saw as insolence, Britons knew as freedom.”
― Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets & Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves

“John Newton had written that he was relieved to have left the trade because “I considered myself as a sort of gaoler or turnkey . . . perpetually conversant with chains, bolts, and shackles.” But to leave behind a career as a prison guard is one thing; to call for closing all prisons entirely another.”
― Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets & Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves

“Lazy ministers simply preached other men’s sermons, sometimes helped by the profitable business of Reverend Dr. John Trusler, who specialized in “abridging the Sermons of eminent divines, and printing them in the form of manuscripts, so as not only to save clergymen the trouble of composing their discourses, but even of transcribing them.” The great man of letters Samuel Johnson joked to his biographer James Boswell that he had never met a clergyman who was religious.”
― Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets & Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves

“One thing more makes these men and women from the age of wigs, swords, and stagecoaches seem surprisingly contemporary. This small group of people not only helped to end one of the worst of human injustices in the most powerful empire of its time; they also forged virtually every important tool used by citizens’ movements in democratic countries today. Think of what you’re likely to find in your mailbox—or electronic mailbox—over a month or two. An invitation to join the local chapter of a national environmental group. If you say yes, a logo to put on your car bumper. A flier asking you to boycott California grapes or Guatemalan coffee. A poster to put in your window promoting this campaign. A notice that a prominent social activist will be reading from her new book at your local bookstore. A plea that you write your representative in Congress or Parliament, to vote for that Guatemalan coffee boycott bill. A “report card” on how your legislators have voted on these and similar issues. A newsletter from the group organizing support for the grape pickers or the coffee workers.
Each of these tools, from the poster to the political book tour, from the consumer boycott to investigative reporting designed to stir people to action, is part of what we take for granted in a democracy. Two and a half centuries ago, few people assumed this. When we wield any of these tools today, we are using techniques devised or perfected by the campaign that held its first meeting at 2 George Yard in 1787. From their successful crusade we still have much to learn. If, early that year, you had stood on a London street corner and insisted that slavery was morally wrong and should be stopped, nine out of ten listeners would have laughed you off as a crackpot. The tenth might have agreed with you in principle, but assured you that ending slavery was wildly impractical: the British Empire’s economy would collapse. The parliamentarian Edmund Burke, for example, opposed slavery but thought that the prospect of ending even just the Atlantic slave trade was “chimerical.” Within a few short years, however, the issue of slavery had moved to center stage in British political life. There was an abolition committee in every major city or town in touch with a central committee in London. More than 300,000 Britons were refusing to eat slave-grown sugar. Parliament was flooded with far more signatures on abolition petitions than it had ever received on any other subject. And in 1792, the House of Commons passed the first law banning the slave trade. For reasons we will see, a ban did not take effect for some years to come, and British slaves were not finally freed until long after that. But there was no mistaking something crucial: in an astonishingly short period of time, public opinion in Europe’s most powerful nation had undergone a sea change. From this unexpected transformation there would be no going back.”
― Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves