Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics by Rebecca Solnit

Author:Rebecca Solnit [Solnit, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: History, Americas, Political Science
ISBN: 9780520251090
Google: BtG1-Scm08kC
Amazon: 0520256565
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2007-06-18T04:00:00+00:00

AWAKENINGS AND COINCIDENCES

One can imagine the characters of Adam Hochschild’s wonderful new history, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves, as they might have been drawn by Lombardi, such is the complexity of the network Hochschild depicts while tracing the British antislavery movement from Quakers in London to slave rebellions in the Caribbean, from the 1780s when the movement began to the final, long-delayed abolition of slavery in the British Empire on August 1, 1838. The book is both a gripping history of a particular movement and a beautiful embodiment of the erratic, unlikely ways movements unfold—an unfolding that consists of multiple kinds of linkages. If Lombardi’s is post-conceptualist history painting, Hochschild’s book is likewise a kind of post–Great Man history writing, one with crowds, coincidences, and ocean currents looming up behind the key activists he delineates.*

One kind of linkage is coincidence. Another is friendship and the affinities of interests and emotions on which friendships are based. Bury the Chains begins, in fact, with two remarkable series of coincidences that deliver up as their results two of the principal activists against slavery. Granville Sharp was the youngest of eight siblings who played music together and shared an evangelical piety. King George III believed that Sharp had the best voice in England. His brother, William Sharp, the king’s physician, provided free medical care to the London poor. Jonathan Strong, a slave whose owner had pistol-whipped him viciously about the head and then thrown him out on the street to die, came for treatment. Granville happened to be visiting that morning, and the brothers got Strong into a hospital. After his months of convalescence, they found him a job with a pharmacist. One day on the streets of London, his owner encountered his former property healthy and fit, seized Strong, and sold him to a Jamaican plantation owner, arranging for him to be jailed until he could be shipped to the West Indies. The Sharp brothers intervened and managed to free him. “With this case,” writes Hochschild, “the thirty-two-year-old Granville Sharp became by default the leading defender of blacks in London, and indeed one of the few people in all of England to speak out against slavery. And speak he would, vehemently, for nearly half a century. The fight against slavery quickly became his dominating passion.”

Only one coincidence, the meeting with Strong, made Sharp an activist. But the string of events that brought the most pivotal activist into being was far stranger and more Lombardian. An antislavery activist, Olaudah Equiano, a former slave from what is now Nigeria via Barbados and Virginia, whose autobiography later had a huge impact on the movement, saw a letter in the Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser on March 18, 1783, which recounted a case involving the British slave ship Zong. Equiano called on Sharp, and Sharp made the case a minor cause célèbre. It was an insurance case, on the face of it. The insurers challenged the claim of

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