I've just finished reading Bury the Chains by the ever-reliable and thoughtful Adam Hochschild, whose King Leopold's Ghost was a stunning indictment of imperialism masked by fine-sounding sentiments of the pursuit of science, the mission of Christianity, and the goal of liberation of Africa from itself.

Bury the Chains is the story of the movement to abolish slavery, as it began in the 1770s in Britain. It concentrates mostly on the effort to abolish the slave trade, which picked up steam very rapidly but then went into abeyance as revolutions broke out in the United States and France and war descended on Europe. A law was finally passed by parliament in 1807. (Slavery itself was banned in the U.K. in 1833.)

What is remarkable about the book, and I fancy was clearly in Hochschild's mind as he wrote, is what it says about the arc and complexities of a liberation struggle. Almost every page struck me as offering lessons to any social justice movement, even the cause of animal liberation. I hope over the next few weeks to write about what I see as the important lessons from history that all of us who care about what seems to be an impossible goal can learn from the effort to abolish the enslavement of Africans by people of European origin.