Content Bury the Chains is a narrative history of the antislavery movement in the United Kingdom. It follows a group of British abolitionist activists and chronicles their successful campaign to end slavery in the British Empire. The group includes Granville Sharp, an unconventional civil libertarian; Thomas Clarkson, a University of Cambridge graduate who dedicated his life to the antislavery campaign; John Newton, a former slave ship captain turned Evangelical preacher; William Wilberforce, an English politician and close friend of British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger; and Olaudah Equiano, a former slave who bought his freedom and became an abolitionist writer. The book starts out with an overview of slavery and the slave trade in 18th-century Britain. Hochschild then details the start of the antislavery campaign in England, from Granville Sharp's advocacy of African slave James Somerset in Somerset v Stewart in 1772 to the establishment of Granville Town, Province of Freedom in 1787. After that, English abolitionist Thomas Clarkson serves as the book's central figure. Hochschild recounts how as a student at the University of Cambridge, Clarkson became so appalled by the slave trade while researching the topic for his prize-winning antislavery essay that he dedicated the rest of his life to the antislavery movement. Clarkson later found allies for his cause in the Quakers, one of whom, bookstore and printing shop owner James Phillips, agreed to publish his antislavery essay. The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was thus formed in May 1787 with both Clarkson and Sharp as founding members, holding meetings in Phillips's bookstore. Hochschild covers "the bleak decade" from 1792 to 1802, when the needs of the French Revolutionary Wars and the Haitian Revolution initially set the antislavery campaign back. Even then, the campaign continued to gain ground thanks to an effective boycott of slave-produced sugar, and the advocacy of men such as army officer George Pinckard and painter William Blake. Hochschild acknowledges the crucial role of women's societies and women activists such as Elizabeth Heyrick. These societies circulated antislavery publications and petitions, raised funds for the campaign, spoke out against slavery at public meetings, and led the sugar boycott, refusing to patronize bakers and shopkeepers who used and sold slave-produced sugar. Hochschild explains how the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act 1807 came about not just through activism alone, but also as a result of national rhetoric and economic warfare against