Eighteenth-century Britain was the world's leading exponent of the slave trade: profits soared and among the beneficiaries were the Church of England and London's Tate Gallery. Yet in the space of a few short years, beginning in 1788, a group of Abolitionists moved the cause of anti-slavery to the very centre of British political life, from the floor of Parliament to the homes of 300,000 people boycotting Caribbean sugar. At their head was Thomas Clarkson, a divinity student who travelled 35,000 miles on horseback documenting abuses, talking to supporters, and evading attempts on his life. With Granville Sharp and James Phillips he founded the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and gave platforms to freed slaves such as Olaudah Equiano, who had experienced the horrors in full. Clarkson's movement resembled nothing England had ever seen before: outside both Parliament and Church, it was the first major embodiment of the forces that today we call civil society, and Hochschild, drawing on the voluminous letters and journals of the characters involved, brings it compellingly to life.
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Höhe: 234 mm
Breite: 153 mm
Dicke: 42 mm
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ISBN-13
978-0-333-90491-6 (9780333904916)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Adam Hochschild's first book, Half the Way Home: a Memoir of Father and Son, was published in 1986. It was followed by The Mirror at Midnight: a Journey into the Heart of South Africa and The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin. His 1997 collection, Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels won the PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the Art of the Essay. King Leopold's Ghost: a Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa won the Duff Cooper Prize in the UK, the Lionel Gelber Prize in Canada and was a finalist for the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award in the United States. Bury the Chains: the British Struggle to Abolish Slavery was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. To End All Wars: a Story of Protest and Patriotism in the First World War, was published by Macmillan in 2011. His books have been translated into twelve languages.
Hochschild teaches writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and has been a Fulbright Lecturer in India. He lives in Berkeley with his wife, the sociologist and author Arlie Hochschild. They have two sons and one grandchild.
