The Book Prize Index

Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves

Adam Hochschild

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.

HistoryHistory · medium confidenceHistory81 signalsLlm Classifier: History -> HistoryKeyword Classifier: American History -> American HistoryTopic Classifier: Slavery & Emancipation -> American HistorySlavery & EmancipationAmerican Civil WarAfrica & the African Diaspora

Award History

2 wins · 4 total

AwardYearResultCategory / Notes
Lionel Gelber Prize: International AffairsMajor2006WinnerSecondary source
Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History2005WinnerSecondary source
National Book Award for NonfictionMajor2005FinalistSecondary source
Dayton Literary Peace Prize: Nonfiction2006FinalistSecondary source
View all award history (4)
Experimental book profileGenerated by GPT-5.4 nano · may contain inaccuracies

This is an unverified interpretation of the catalog description, offered as an opt-in discovery experiment—not as bibliographic fact.

  1. 01 Central figures

    None extracted with sufficient confidence.

    These suggestions did not meet the normal display threshold and are more likely to be wrong.

    • Josiah Wedgwood62%

  2. 02 Central places

    • London78%

  3. 03 Suggested argument

    No argument inferred with sufficient confidence.

    This suggestion did not meet the normal display threshold and is more likely to be wrong.

    The antislavery campaign that began in England in the 1780s helped free hundreds of thousands of slaves worldwide, using activist tools that proved effective and predated U.S. emancipation.

    Model confidence 45%

  4. 04 Reading orientation

    35 / 100 academic

    Serious trade

    An estimate of intended readership and scholarly apparatus—not quality or importance.

Confidence percentages are the model's own estimates. Profile confidence: 78%.