Chapter 4- Hochschild's Bury the Chains

The British West Indies was the center of business as explained in Chapter 4 of Hochschild’s Bury the Chains. The most important commodity of the 18th century of course was sugar. The whites that ruled this trade although profit making entrepreneurs, were themselves very uncivil. They ate like pigs and used slaves for every possible manual labor. One man that traveled to the Caribbean, James Stephen, spent most of his early days chasing women around until he came to the West Indies and experienced the horror first hand. He saw such corruption and mistreatment and it moved him to make a life change. He was brought to Codrington, one of the largest sugar plantations, and witnessed the toughest any slave would be put through. Cultivation sugar cane one of the hardest ways of life on earth. People were worked to death, and slave owners would just replace them as if they were a part in a running machine. The author ends the chapter by saying that the Church of England also benefited from slavery and did nothing to stop the injustice.