Robin White reviews Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains. A detail:
The life of the slaves who cut and harvested the sugar was hellish and short: they died being captured, they died crossing the Atlantic, they died from beatings and they died from sheer hard work on the sugar plantations. During the period of the slave trade, more than two million were shipped to the Caribbean. At its close, there were fewer than 670,000. By contrast, the 400,000 shipped to the Americas (where sugar cane was not the only crop) had grown to four million.I read Hochschild's earlier King Leopold's Ghost - as White describes it, 'the tale of one of [the] most terrible abuses of human rights: the theft of a vast country and the killing of between five and eight million of its inhabitants'. In the new book Hochschild tells of those who fought to end slavery: John Newton, Thomas Clarkson, Elizabeth Heyrick and others. White calls Bury the Chains 'a testimony to both evil and goodness: a story in which, for once, goodness wins'.Cutting sugar was back-breaking and dangerous. Slaves would often fall asleep and let their hands slip into the crushing mills. A machete was kept nearby to cut off an entire arm in order to save them.