Transcript

Rob’s intro [00:00:00]

Rob Wiblin: Hi listeners, this is The 80,000 Hours Podcast, where we have unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems, what you can do to solve them, and whether we need a silly intro joke for absolutely every episode regardless of the topic. I’m Rob Wiblin, Head of Research at 80,000 Hours.

Back in episodes #130 and #136, I spoke with Will MacAskill about his new book What We Owe the Future, where among other things he argues that what people value is far more fragile and historically contingent than it might first seem.

As an example, today it feels like the abolition of slavery was an inevitable part of the arc of history. But Will lays out in the book why he thinks the best research on the topic suggests otherwise.

Much of the research he was referring to came from today’s guest Christopher Brown.

This was maybe my favourite part of Will’s book, or at least the part I and many other readers found most provocative — and I was delighted when Christopher agreed to come on the show.

I felt he was arguably the best person in the world to talk about:

• How generalised opposition to slavery got started and then grew into a widespread movement over 150 years
• Why it happened when and where it did (and not much earlier or later)
• And whether this process was ‘inevitable’ as the Industrial Revolution progressed, as a way to understand the contingency of moral progress over time

Christopher didn’t disappoint, and I hope you get as much out of the conversation as I did.

We go through:

• The signs of antislavery sentiment that existed before the 17th century
• How abolitionism became a mainstream view in Britain during the 18th century
• How we can ever know if a change was highly likely to happen, vs very chancy and easily interrupted
• Whether there’s any modest change we could make to the setup of the world in 1600 that would make it probable for slavery to remain a widespread practice today
• The distribution of slavery globally
• The main counterarguments to abolitionism people raised at the time
• Why so many abolitionists were Quakers
• The role of economic factors in causing these ideas to get a foothold
• The best arguments against Christopher’s view on the non-inevitability of abolition
• And much more

Just a note that I had some technical difficulties on my end for this one for the first couple of hours. And by technical difficulties I mean that I screwed up.

Our engineering team has made a heroic effort in improving my audio, but my voice isn’t quite as beautiful to listen to as it normally is.

All right, without further ado, I bring you Christopher Brown.

The interview begins [00:02:49]

Rob Wiblin: Today I’m speaking with Christopher Leslie Brown. Christopher is a professor of history at Columbia University, specialising in the history of the British Empire during the 17th and 18th centuries — in particular, slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, and the movement towards abolition.

Years ago, he had his DPhil at Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship, before returning to the US to work at Rutgers University and then Johns Hopkins University, and finally Columbia University, where he teaches and supervises doctoral students on these topics to this very day. He’s the author of Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism, as well as Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age. And he’s written for The New York Times and the London Review of Books, among many other outlets.

Thanks for coming on the podcast, Christopher.

Christopher Brown: Very glad to be here. Thank you for the invitation.

Rob Wiblin: I hope we’re going to get to talk about how slavery was abolished, and whether or not that was an inevitability. But first, what are your main research interests and other projects these days?

Christopher Brown: Right now, I’m doing more and more work on the Atlantic slave trade itself. I’m increasingly looking at the experience of European men who were resident in present-day Ghana, present-day Nigeria, Senegal, Gambia. These were the guys who were sent out by slave ship merchants — from Liverpool, from Bristol, and from London — to do the work of coordinating the slave trade on the ground. I’m very interested in the experience of those people, as essentially tiny minorities in West African societies who were serving as liaisons between West African slaving merchants and British European slaving merchants.

Rob Wiblin: So these are the descendants of people who were leading the slave trade in West Africa, basically, a few centuries on?

Christopher Brown: Yes. Most of these guys who were sent out died very quickly. The mortality rate for Europeans in West Africa in the first six months was somewhere around 40% to 50%. So to say turnover was high is obviously a major exaggeration — yellow fever, malaria, all those things chewed up people very quickly. But they were really significant as linchpins in the operation of the Atlantic slave trade.

One of the things that I’m trying to understand is how the Atlantic slave trade worked on an everyday basis. It’s Tuesday, January 3, 1742, and we’re on the beaches near Cape Coast Castle. What’s going on on that particular day? That’s what I’m really trying to understand. It’s the texture of life. It’s the everydayness of something that we rightly look back on as horrific that I’m really trying to understand. For the people who are doing this work, what is their experience? What is their outlook? How do they understand themselves? How do they understand the people that they’re dealing with? How do they understand the people they’re trading?

Rob Wiblin: There’s been a big turn in history over the last 50 years or something towards focusing a little bit less on great figures, leaders, military history, and so on, and towards trying to understand everyday experiences and beliefs and attitudes and lives of typical people. Which I think previously, historians really hadn’t thought was necessarily worth paying all that much attention to. Is that right?

Christopher Brown: Yeah, it’s a movement that’s been going on for some time now. In the profession we talk about “social history,” which is really trying to get at the lives of people who don’t leave papers, who are not famous — to try to get at, as I was saying before, the texture of life in particular communities. But it’s very challenging to do that, because the records are not preserved in the same way. You can understand people in a mass, rather than as individual biographies, typically.

And for the Atlantic slave trade, it’s even harder, because most of the folks who went out there left very few traces of their lives. So you have to be very creative and very determined to try to recover some aspects of that experience. Obviously, it’s even more difficult to get at the experience of enslaved men and women themselves. And scholars, many colleagues and friends of mine, have been doing that work.

I have a perverse interest in the slave traders themselves, and when they’re in West Africa, they were both very powerful and they were also very weak. That tension between being in a position of economic power, but also in a position of, you might say, military, political, even biological weakness is something that I find very interesting.

Rob Wiblin: You were saying that there are descendants of these slave traders in West Africa today?

Christopher Brown: My point is that, yes, the Atlantic slave trade does not work without West African elites capturing and selling folks. So yes, there are descendants of slave traders in West Africa; there are descendants of slave traders in Europe and the Americas. This is an issue that sometimes confuses people. I think one way to think about it is the wealthy and powerful from two different worlds conspiring to exploit the weak, the poor, the politically defeated, those who’ve been condemned to crimes. It’s in some ways an international, economically privileged group that’s battening on a very vulnerable group of people and selling them into slavery in the Americas.

Was abolitionism inevitable? [00:08:21]

Rob Wiblin: We’ll come back to some of these things in a minute, but it might be good to wind back a little bit to the start.

Christopher Brown: Absolutely.

Rob Wiblin: We’ll get some context for the conversation and then maybe zoom out a little bit, think about slavery as a historical phenomenon.

A bit of background that might be useful for some listeners is that one reason we’re talking today is that Will MacAskill, a regular guest on the show, cites your work quite a bit in his book from this year — What We Owe the Future — as part of this broad argument that we shouldn’t be complacent and take the abolition of slavery quite so much for granted as perhaps we tend to do today. This is part of Will’s argument that we kind of just assume that moral values are always going to improve and are going to necessarily get better as technology advances — and how we should actually have some level of fear that in fact, things might go in a bad direction in future, or that we haven’t gone in as good a direction in the present as we perhaps think that we have. We discussed that with him back in episode 136 earlier this year.

I’m really keen to hear how much you agree with all of that, given your expertise on abolitionism, and perhaps also field some arguments for and against the idea that the antislavery movement was historically contingent, or at least not inevitable. It’s one of the lines of argument in the book that seems to have been the most frequently disputed among reviews and commentary that I’ve seen, and I think it’s just because the notion that slavery could have persisted into our current era violates common sense for most readers. It feels so crazy and so awful to contemplate. People think about that and they generate specific economic and cultural arguments to explain why that feels intuitively so wrong to them.

Do you want to comment on that first?

Christopher Brown: Yeah. It’s obviously a big topic and it’s one of these subjects that, by its very nature, can’t be proved or disproved. The fact of the matter is, we don’t know what would have happened in the 19th century and into the early 20th century if antislavery movements had not arisen at the end of the 18th century, if the British slave trade had not been abolished in 1807, or if there had not been an international movement to suppress the slave trade through the first half of the 19th century. We don’t know. And it’s important to start from that position.

I’ve taken the view that the things that did happen that led to slave trade abolition and emancipation — given where the world had been in the 18th century — that the changes in the 19th century were not only not inevitable, but they were actually very unlikely. And I ground that in the economic strength of the Atlantic slave trade and the economic value of slavery in the 19th century. Even in the face of abolitionist and emancipationist movements, there’s no record, at least that I’m aware of, of slave traders or slaveholding societies saying that they had had enough and they weren’t going to do this anymore.

Slaving is as old as human history, and I think we tend to forget that it was a norm rather than an exception, and it took different shapes in different times. This is big picture, but what happens in the 19th century I really think is quite unusual, and I don’t think it’s the natural consequence of either economic forces or cultural forces.

Rob Wiblin: Inasmuch as one of the arguments is that it was just incredibly profitable, there was an enormous industry and enormous amount of money invested in this. A modern-day analogy might be to the oil industry, where people make arguments — often reasonable, plausible ones — that we should stop using coal or stop using oil. But it’s not inevitable that we’re going to do that anytime soon because it’s just so costly to do it. And from an economic point of view, there’s a massive industry arrayed against that notion. Do you think that’s a good parallel?

Christopher Brown: It’s not a bad comparison, just in terms of the economic logic of it. I think what also has to be said is, obviously this is changing now, but so much of the infrastructure of our lives takes fossil fuels for granted: it’s premised on the existence and the exploitation of fossil fuels. The same was true with slavery in the early modern era: it was baked into the world that emerged in the Americas in the 1500s. And to get out of that world required a degree of imagination and commitment that was really special.

And we’ll get to this, but one thing I really want to try to make clear is that a certain kind of ideals or values were not enough to make that transition — that it needed to feel useful and beneficial to really important people for that change to take place. In the same way, it’s not enough to say that the exploitation of fossil fuels is bad for the climate, bad for a lot of things — there need to be other reasons for that change. But it’s not a bad comparison, actually.

The history of slavery [00:13:48]

Rob Wiblin: Lots of people, including me, have the intuition that surely we would have gotten rid of slavery sooner or later — the arguments are just so compelling. But it’s so hard to have a trained useful intuition about that, knowing so little about the historical details of how abolition actually came about and the history of slavery more broadly.

Probably we should start by spending quite a bit of the conversation just getting out the basic facts here, because I think many people, including me, are not super familiar with them now, and I was extremely unfamiliar with them before the recent conversation this year.

We’re going to talk a lot about the British Empire between the 17th and 19th centuries. But first, maybe let’s take a moment to consider all the times before that. First off, what is the history of slavery in general? You were saying it’s extremely common — could you flesh that out a bit more?

Christopher Brown: My goodness. Well, anybody who’s studied the classics knows that slaveholding was essential in classical Greece, the Roman Republic, and the Roman Empire. There was significant trafficking in men, women, and children across the Sahara from really earliest recorded history down to the 19th and early 20th centuries. Vikings made their names as Vikings by slave raids all around the North Sea and the Mediterranean. Slavery has a deep ancient history, and I’m just talking about the European context right now.

When Europeans arrived in the Americas, they started enslaving Native Americans. And when that became politically difficult and costly, they turned to West Africans — where they already had an experience of West African captives who would come up through North Africa into the Mediterranean. So the story of the conquest, the settlement of the Americas is partially about the involuntary migration of West Africans.

One colleague I have has made the argument that something like two thirds to three quarters of the migrants to the Americas down to the 1800s were of African descent. We think about migration often as a European story into the Americas, but at least down to the period of the French Revolution, there were far more African migrants to the Western Hemisphere than there were European migrants.

Rob Wiblin: What about the rest of the world, and other times? If we look at the rest of Africa or India or China, was slavery ubiquitous through all of these places?

Christopher Brown: Yes, although what starts to become difficult is that there are so many different forms of coercion and dependency on freedom. We use the term “slavery” to capture what is in fact a great variety of practices. For example, one challenge that modern audiences sometimes have is the idea that slaves were used to generate wealth as forced labourers. In many societies — and this is especially true in the Middle East, in much of Islamic civilisation, in large parts of South Asia, in parts of mediaeval early modern East Asia, Korea, China — slaves were employed in ways that were sometimes for sex, sometimes as the coerced loyal servants to the head of state.

So the practices of slavery are so varied. What happens in the Americas is one really important iteration. And if we’re looking for common features, in some ways, it’s the social and legal fact of being possessed by another person and utilised as if you are a thing — which is to say, as if you have no will of your own. And that’s obviously a fiction because people do have wills of their own, regardless of how subjugated they are. But what slavery in some ways attempts to achieve is a dehumanisation of the human. So when scholars look to try to identify slavery in other times and in other places, often what they’re focusing on is that set of practices. But it wasn’t invented in colonial America by any means.

Signs of antislavery sentiment before the 17th century [00:18:15]

Rob Wiblin: What signs of antislavery sentiment were there elsewhere, or earlier in history, before the 17th century? Which is maybe where we’ll start the current story.

Christopher Brown: This is also really interesting, because it doesn’t actually take a great deal of moral insight to see that slavery raises all kinds of deep moral and ethical issues. In the civilisations where we have records that allow us to explore those tensions, those views, a familiar way of thinking about this subject is: where you see defences of slavery, there must also have been questions and attacks on it.

And in Greek times and Roman times, there are all kinds of ways that slavery is justified. Sometimes the idea that the enslaved person is naturally a slave — that, of course, was Aristotle’s way of looking at the subject, very famously. Some emphasise that it’s the body that’s enslaved but not the spirit, and there’s a whole body of Roman thought among the Stoics that made that point. There’s a very long tradition in the Latin legal tradition, right down to the Middle Ages, that regard slavery as against natural law, as a violation of natural law, but instead as a creature of the laws of nations — that it becomes conventional in human civilisations, even though it’s not part of the natural order of things.

Then the other thing that happens, and this is actually really important for this subject, is that slavery is a state that’s regarded as a kind of misfortune. Because, especially in the Mediterranean world, anybody can be enslaved, taken as captive — there’s no races that are marked as “slave races” per se. There develops a very strong notion that, first of all, obviously the status of slavery is something to avoid. But collective identities begin to establish around who should be enslaved and who should not be enslaved. And this goes with the rise of Christendom and then with the development of Islam, where the taking of slaves is what you do to those who are not of your religious world.

Rob Wiblin: So that’s a religious defence. That’s one way that people try to explain it.

Christopher Brown: It begins in the Middle Ages to acquire a religious framework, where those who are of a different confessional world are those who should be enslaved.

Rob Wiblin: It sounds like throughout history, people came up with various different explanations for how it is that enslavement could be justified, which you are taking as a sign that people felt that there was something to defend. It’s a sign that there was at least personal discomfort, or perhaps some collective discomfort, that people didn’t feel like this was necessarily right, so they had to rationalise it some way or another.

But were there any organised movements, or did people ever get together and say, “Actually we think this is bad and we should get rid of it”?

Christopher Brown: Right. Well, the first thing to say — and it’s very easy to miss this, but it’s fundamental — is that enslaved men and women did whatever they could to get out of the status of being slaves. They did that individually, and they did it collectively. So I want to be clear that in talking about antislavery today, what we’d mostly be talking about is the efforts by people who were neither slaveholders nor slaves to challenge that system. It’s quite correct to see slave rebellions and uprisings as a manifestation of an antislavery mindset. So I want to be really clear about that.

From a collective point of view, no, there are not movements as such that are aimed at the abolition of slavery itself. Now, there are moments, for example, in the mid 16th century, there’s a great debate in the Spanish court around whether the enslavement of Native Americans in Mexico and Peru and South America and the Caribbean has legal and moral legitimacy. And famously, the friar Bartolomé de las Casas, with several others, challenges whether the Crown has the right to enslave the people that they have conquered. And there are all kinds of limits that are put on in consequence, of the kinds of coercion that can be put in place.

But this is what antislavery looks like prior to the 18th century: specific challenges to specific practices among specific people, in specific moments and places. Rather than the much grander view that slavery itself everywhere as practiced is illegitimate, and therefore should be struck from the face of the Earth.

Rob Wiblin: Just to deal with the slave rebellion issue: as I understand it, there were slave revolts, people attempting to escape enslavement throughout history, but none of them was really enduringly successful until the revolution in Haiti in 1791. Why is it that all of these attempts by enslaved people to overturn slavery, at least in their case, never really presented an enduring or really functional challenge to slavery as an institution?

Christopher Brown: It’s such an interesting question, Rob, because it really goes to our question of what we mean by success. And the Haitian Revolution does set kind of a standard by which all other rebellions against slavery, in the Americas anyway, is measured. Because the insurgents overthrew what was at the time the wealthiest, most prosperous slave colony in the Americas, and perhaps the most prosperous of any that had ever existed. And how that happened has a lot to do with the specifics of that revolutionary moment and the specifics of Saint-Domingue.

One thing to think about is that enslaved men and women were often very successful in freeing themselves individually, and sometimes collectively — by running away, by escaping; sometimes by murdering the families that held them; by establishing redoubts in the backcountry, in the hinterlands and maroon communities where they could establish their own freedom.

The problem is that, in the Americas anyway, the entire world was conceived in a way to keep enslaved men and women under control. And it’s hard to fully reckon with the degree of terror that was inflicted on enslaved men and women from the moment they arrived in the Americas, or from the moment that they came of age in the Americas — to know that if you crossed a line in any way, you could have an arm chopped off, you could have your hamstring torn, you could have an ear lopped off.

And so the question of, “Why not more rebellions?” in some ways I think can be turned around to say it’s extraordinary that there were any at all. It really speaks to that commitment and determination to be free. The period of the Haitian Revolution is very unusual, and so the distinctiveness of those events speaks to the distinctiveness of the moment.

And those who were free — who became free or freed themselves or were manumitted or escaped — in many instances, their freedom was fragile. Because — and this is why race was so important — you could mark out those who had been slaves by the colour of their skin.

Rob Wiblin: They were always under threat, I suppose.

Christopher Brown: They were always under threat, and the danger of being reenslaved was always there. And this really goes to why antislavery movements are so important. To imagine that the entire system could be destroyed requires a degree of imagination and political power and capacity that an individual person…

If I decided that I wanted to overthrow the United States, I could go shoot up the Capitol — and I hope the Secret Service is not listening to me right now — but I’d be dead in a matter of seconds. It was tried on January 6. You could get thousands of people together, but the forces of order in any society are so much more powerful than its challengers.

So what enslaved men and women more often than not hoped to do was to escape, to get out from under slavery, and to free the people that they cared about: their mothers, their fathers, their cousins, their kin, the people that they worked with. In some ways, that’s as far — at least until the middle of the 18th century — as they could imagine having an effect and having an influence.

Rob Wiblin: I’ve listened to history lectures about ancient Rome and ancient Greece, where there’s many more cases of slaves being freed. And in that context, it’s a little bit surprising that even when they became writers and intellectuals and politicians and so on, in one sense, it’s shocking that they weren’t then campaigners against slavery. But I suppose it’s possible we’ve lost their words. And it’s possible just that it’s such a leap to imagine that you can overthrow the social order that the great majority of people would just never contemplate such a thing, even if they were personally really appalled by what was going on.

Christopher Brown: And I think in places where the enslavement seemed like a consequence of misfortune. You know, captivity, being conquered in war. Somebody who had been captured in war, someone who found themselves essentially on the wrong side of the master-slave relationship, if they were manumitted or they escaped, it was not unusual for them to become a slave.

The famous case of this is a West African case of princes from what’s present-day Nigeria, who were slave traders — some of them prominent slave traders — and who themselves were taken captive, although they were not supposed to be taken captive, shipped to the Americas, brought to England, and then brought back to West Africa to improve diplomatic relations after those princes had been captured. And they went right back to slave trading.

And you would think that somebody who had seen it, who had experienced it for themselves would say, “My God, I’m not going to do this anymore.” But there you have, what we might think of today as class privilege: “I’m not supposed to be enslaved; that’s for other people.” And once returning to the place of social status and privilege, they return back to their rightful place of being able to trade other people.

It’s not like that in the Americas, because race operates very differently, and you can’t escape the stain of being of enslaved background, even if you are free.

Quakers [00:29:41]

Rob Wiblin: Let’s turn now to the British Empire in the 17th century. Who were the early pioneers who started to argue that slavery was wrong and should be eliminated? Who are the major cast of characters here?

Christopher Brown: You can find individuals in most of the colonies. You think about New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New England, where there are kind of isolated statements that have come down to us about, “This seems immoral. It seems like it’s questionable from the standpoint of our faith.”

But it’s Quakers, it’s the Society of Friends who are really the first community that question the very moral basis of slaveholding in a consistent way. It’s important to say, though, that Quakers were slaveholders and slave traders, even though they were having these discussions amongst themselves as early as the late 17th century, in the 1680s, 1690s. So in some ways, many of us who write on this subject find the seeds of the movement — although I’m hesitant about that metaphor — in Quakers and the Society of Friends.

Rob Wiblin: So in terms of the journey from slavery just being generally accepted by almost everyone almost all of the time, to it being completely unacceptable and abolished except for a handful of illegal cases, there’s different filters that we have to pass through. And we can try to guess which of these filters is the hardest step to get through — which is the one that is the least likely to happen, if we were to change history?

Christopher Brown: That’s a great way of putting it.

Rob Wiblin: So here we’re talking about one of the filters, which is that you need to get at least a few people talking about this among themselves, and sharing their ideas with their friends, and objecting to it. Then I suppose the next filter is that they need to actually recruit other people, and start organising, and become a meaningful advocacy group within society.

How important as a filter was this stage? That you first had some people who were engaged in the Quaker community who think that this is inconsistent with their faith, or that something is wrong about this, and they’re starting to speak out and write about it? Was that a pivotal moment?

Christopher Brown: Yeah. It begins as a kind of dissenting group within the Society of Friends, who take the position that, “The violence that slavery requires goes against our pacifistic values. The wealth that slavery enables contradicts our witness on behalf of simplicity. The pride, the control of other people that slavery allows, conflicts with the values that we say we place on humility.”

And Quakers are unusual, because they don’t have essentially a ministry, a priesthood — because anyone can express religious witness, it meant that those dissenters had a voice within the Society of Friends in terms of challenging the broader majority. And they couldn’t be silenced in the way of, “That’s not orthodox; those are not our beliefs.” They couldn’t be shut down in the same way.

And the Society of Friends, over the course of the 1700s, goes through a period of, in some ways, worrying about having fallen away from the ideals of the founding era in the middle of the 17th century. And there’s that fear that the religious practices have become kind of a habit or a ritual, rather than being really deeply believed in. So Quaker testimony around slavery becomes part of a broader examination that’s going on within the Society of Friends of, “Why are we not as devout as our grandfathers and grandmothers had been? Why do we seem to become more like the rest of society?”

As that questioning is happening, and they go through some crises in the middle decades of the 18th century, there are individuals who point to the issue of slavery as one way to restore a notion of their group identity. And this is really important. For Quakers, initially, the sort of testimony against slavery is about establishing an agreement within the Society of Friends about what their values are, about what membership of the Society of Friends requires.

So it’s very much about establishing a group identity, reinforcing a group identity around the fact that, as Quakers, we find slaveholding violates our consciences. This is a place they get to in the 1760s and 1770s. And in fact, what happens is they get to the point where they say, “If you don’t accept this principle, and if you continue to own slaves, you can no longer be a member of the Society of Friends.”

And initially, that’s really focused inward. They’re not campaigning initially to try to transform their broader society — the broader community, the colony, the Empire. It’s about establishing a sense of “Who are we, collectively?” So in the same way that Quakers develop a sense of “We do not serve in war,” they also increasingly take the view that to be a Quaker means not to be a slaveholder, not to be a slave trader.

But they’re a tiny fraction of the colonial population. So the interesting question when you think about filters is: How does that internal witness, that collective identity, then get directed outward to the broader society? And it’s at that moment, when that happens, that there develops a broader antislavery movement in the British and American world.

Rob Wiblin: So I guess one theory for why it is that abolitionism took off exactly in this place at this time — or began to gain momentum where it hadn’t really anywhere else, at any other time or in any other place before — might be that the Quakers were just an extremely unusual religious group. And they provided this small, safe environment in which these ideas and particular motivations — in terms of self-identifying as a particular group who had their particular spiritual practices that defined them in distinction with the rest of society — provided a place where this could get going, where that hadn’t existed before.

The Quakers are definitely an unusual religious denomination in a global historical sense. The lack of hierarchy is quite peculiar. The interest in hearing ideas from all kinds of different members of the congregation is not typical. But I wonder, are they so different than other religious groups that have existed through history that that alone can explain the phenomenon?

Christopher Brown: No, not alone. But they are really distinctive. One other thing I would add is that they believed in what we would call co-education almost from the get-go. They had women as ministers, as travelling preachers. If you think about the 17th and 18th century world, this was highly unusual. They really believed in a kind of equality across sex that no other Christian denomination in the European or American world believed in. And I would venture to say it’s probably true for most other societies as well, with the exception of maybe some Native American societies. I mean, they’re really, really, really unusual in that regard.

I think what matters in a way is that Quakers established really strong communities in places where slavery was present, but it wasn’t absolutely fundamental to the social order. In Pennsylvania, New Jersey, parts of New York and New England, slaves were worked in what we come to know as “the North” from the very beginning of European settlement in those places. But they never become more than 20% of the population — in most instances, it’s more like 5% or 10%. And even more important, slaves are not doing work that white men and women of limited means aren’t doing. There’s not “slave work” in the way that there is slave work in the Chesapeake, or even more in the Carolinas, or even more in the Caribbean. So what that means is the Quakers were in a world where slavery existed, but the entire order wasn’t dependent on it.

So if you combine their really unusual social practices, their unusual religious beliefs, their really unusual pacifism; and in a place where slavery is present — so they are confronted with the subject, but not fundamental, which is to say that it’s not a kind of weight-bearing aspect of the society — it’s a set of features that make it possible to question it without risking a total overthrow of the socioeconomic order.

And one way we can see the importance of that is that Quakers who are in Barbados never become significant abolitionists.

Rob Wiblin: Because Barbados is one of the main slave colonies, right?

Christopher Brown: Really the first major sugar colony in the English empire. And there were a lot of Quakers in Barbados as of the late 17th century. And there were some dissenters there on slaveholding, but they were quickly shut down. The dissenting tradition never really develops there.

So it’s never just one variable. I mean, there are aspects of the Society of Friends that really are distinctive, but I think being at the peripheries, the boundaries, the northern borderland of the plantation world means that they’re really knowledgeable and thoughtful about it, and invested in it to a degree, but not so much so that they can’t question it in really important ways.

Rob Wiblin: That’s really interesting. I guess an alternative explanation, or at least a contributing factor, could be that during this period of colonialism, there was more diversity in economic structures and social structures and populations in these different places that were being colonised. You’re saying what you needed was slavery to be present — so that people could see it and object to it, and especially a very unpleasant kind of slavery that people would naturally really object to — but it had to not be so fundamental that opposing it would necessarily mean a complete revolution in the social order, and would be really brutally shut down by the powers that be.

Christopher Brown: Yes, that’s right. That’s right. And it’s the reason why in a North American context, it’s Massachusetts, it’s Pennsylvania, and New York to a degree, where antislavery organising really coheres for the first time in the 1770s and the 1780s.

Attitudes to slavery in other religions [00:41:00]

Rob Wiblin: One way to try to get some insight on this question of whether it’s the Quakers that are a really important contributing factor, is to ask whether we see incipient antislavery movements among other religious denominations. Were there meaningful Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox or Muslim antislavery movements? If we don’t see that, but we do see it quite a lot among the Quakers, the Society of Friends, they were a massive factor. Whereas if we see signs of the same ideas cropping up elsewhere, then we might think it might have happened in one of them eventually, sooner or later. Do you know much about the history of other groups elsewhere?

Christopher Brown: Yeah. We can sort of work from North America outwards. I mean, the New Methodist movement that John Wesley founds in the 1730s and 1740s is concerned to minister to all people and not just Europeans, and to try to find converts even outside the structures of the church. And they try to preach to enslaved men and women.

Some of those evangelicals get very frustrated with slavery, because plantation holders don’t want their slaves to hear the gospel. They don’t want them to discover that they have equality in Christ, that Christ died for all men and women. And they don’t want their slaves to learn to read the Bible. If they start reading the Bible, they might start reading other things. So there’s definitely an evangelical strain of irritation, and then opposition to a degree, which is oriented around the resistance they get to spreading Christianity in places where slaveholding really matters. So that’s another trajectory that becomes important for what actually did happen. But in the absence of the Quakers, it might have become a different route to the future that we know.

The story of the Catholic Church is really interesting, because especially in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, manumission was far more common, and there were many more directives from the church about what it meant to be a Christian master — which meant a certain kind of practices, what we might call sort of “humane” practices of treating enslaved men and women kindly, allowing them to go to church, allowing them in some cases to over time purchase their own freedom. Now, I mean, how much that happened, it’s kind of an ideal that some parts of the church encouraged.

But the way the Catholic Church largely dealt with the problem of slavery was in the very broadest sense to try to encourage almost a kind of peace between masters and slaves, so that the state of violence — which was natural to slavery — instead sort of emphasised a degree of reciprocity. That’s the ideology. It didn’t actually work out that way. But with the Catholic Church, it wasn’t so much challenges to the system as attempts to make slaveholders better people, if I could put it in the most crude possible sense.

Rob Wiblin: Was that the focus, saving the souls of the slaveholders because they might be harmed?

Christopher Brown: Yes. There’s that part of it too. It’s both. But there’s also a real concern about the souls of enslaved men and women, in a way that the Church of England — say, Presbyterians in North America — really were not much concerned with at all. It’s really the evangelical movements of the mid-18th century that make that an issue in the Anglophone world, in the British Empire in the mid-18th century.

One thing I just want to say very quickly, Rob, is that recent scholarship on the cultural and moral thought in the Islamic world is really recovering not just a set of beliefs, but a set of movements, really, to prevent Islamic men and women from being enslaved by either Christians or pagans. Especially in parts of West Africa — the Senegal River Valley, the Upper Gambia, when you think about where today Mali is, western Nigeria today — there were Islamic revivals that aimed in part to prevent the export of Muslim slaves to Christian slave traders who were operating along the coasts.

So we’re learning more about what antislavery looked like in other places. But I would just emphasise in that particular instance that it is an antislavery that’s about protecting the freedom of members of the faith, rather than the notion that slavery in and of itself needs to be overthrown.

Rob Wiblin: That does seem a little bit different. So the objection wasn’t to slavery, per se, it was to slavery by the infidels. So it’s like, “We can’t be handed over to the infidels.” Was that the main objection?

Christopher Brown: Yeah.

Rob Wiblin: But did they also object to enslavement of Muslims by other Muslims?

Christopher Brown: This gets into a very complicated subject that we can only be very brief about, I guess. But under all systems of Islamic law, Muslims are not supposed to enslave other Muslims. Some Muslim powers — especially in the Sudan, the southern shores of the Sahara — would take the view that some African peoples who said they were Muslim were not really Muslim, and so therefore could be taken as slaves because they weren’t true Muslims. And so what does it mean to be Islamic? And how do you measure that if they’re not fully recognisable?

But the notion of enslavement of infidels, but Muslims not enslaving other Muslims, is a very powerful notion in the Mediterranean world. And it’s the same thing for Christians. I mean, Christians do not enslave other Christians in Western Europe or in the Americas — even though they torture each other, they behead each other, they massacre each other. But the notion of slavery is not what you do to those who are of a similar religious world.

Rob Wiblin: Just quickly coming back to the Catholic Church. It sounds like they also saw that there was something that they were struggling to reconcile their theology with the practice of slavery. But the approach that they took was to try to turn slavery into this kind of unfortunate temporary condition, from which one might hope to escape. And thereby you could still say these people can still be saved, they can still be converted in time, and they’re just slaves in the meantime as a personal misfortune. Am I understanding that right?

Christopher Brown: Yeah. This is where historians’ push for specificity and complexity makes generalisations like this very difficult. Because the fact of the matter is that what it looks like in different parts of Brazil, and what it looks like in, say, Cartagena, and what it looks like in Peru, and what it looks like in Mexico is all slightly different, and has also been studied to different degrees.

I do think, though, that the basic contrast that Africans brought to the Americas should be baptised and should become members of the faith, that slaveholders should be concerned with the souls of the people that they hold in slavery, and that there are basic expectations with respect to the capacity to worship — and also, importantly, to bring grievances against slaveholders, to complain of ill treatment. Enslaved men and women were allowed to marry in the church in most parts of Central America and South America, in ways that were simply unthinkable in the British colonies.

So there’s a kind of a wider legitimacy for forms of social life, for rights under law. So the property relationship still held, the dependence still held, the exploitation of labour still held, the control of the body still held. But the church operated in many instances as not quite an intermediary, but as another power — that its spiritual authority could be used by enslaved men and women as leverage against the secular authority of slaveholders.

But I say that, and then it’s important to understand that the Jesuits were the largest corporate slaveholders in the Americas throughout the early modern period. So it’s a very complex picture.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. I want to ask more questions about religion. However, we should probably think about other things as well.

Christopher Brown: Sure.

Rob Wiblin: Just coming back to the topic of how you’ve got these border areas or fringe areas where there’s some slavery, but it’s not so essential to the social order. I suppose that can be a contributing factor, but I think it probably can’t be decisive, because there must have been regions like that elsewhere in the world throughout history.

Christopher Brown: Absolutely. No. I mean, it’s not even close to being decisive. Sometimes historians will make a distinction between “slave societies” and “societies with slaves.” This goes back to an analysis that a great classicist named Moses Finley suggested more than six decades ago, and has been used by historians of slavery in different ways ever since.

The notion is that slave societies are those worlds in which slavery becomes the fundamental defining foundation of that society — the classical cases being classical Rome, the Caribbean, Brazil, the Southern United States — where the whole social, economic and political order, the cultural world is shaped by slavery. And societies with slaves, by contrast, are those places where slavery exists. It’s legal. It is not necessarily questioned, but its importance to the operation of the social and economic world is not nearly to the same degree.

And at the end of this history that we’re talking about, it’s societies with slaves who are more likely to go through a period of emancipation that is less controversial. Or let’s put it this way: it’s easier to achieve than slave societies, where to overthrow slavery is in fact to overthrow the world as it exists.

Quaker advocacy [00:52:07]

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. OK, let’s cut back to the Quakers that we were talking about in the American colonies. You’re saying that there was a time when these ideas were incubated increasingly as part of the self-identity of Quakers. And I guess they were debating this, within their various meetings, trying to decide what is permissible behaviour for a member of our congregation, and what is not.

What was the next step in the story? I think one thread is that these ideas started spreading to Quaker congregations elsewhere in the world. You’re also saying that, having established this norm internally, then they make the decision to turn outwards and start advocating for this to other groups, rather than just keeping it as something that only concerns them.

Christopher Brown: Yeah, that’s right. But it does not move smoothly or quickly or without controversy. And it really develops at first in Pennsylvania — where Pennsylvania Quakers, and especially those based in Philadelphia, as part of this movement of religious reform, internal reform, make a witness against slavery a definition of their communal identity. And then they push it: they push it out to Virginia, they push it out to North Carolina, they push it out to Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

And meet some resistance. And meet resistance at Quaker meetings, who to put it crudely, take the view of, “Well, I get your point, but we’re not going to do that. If you all decide that you want to make that a term of your witness, that’s fine. But where we are, there are many of us who value the ability to own slaves. We don’t really agree that it’s against the religious witness. It never has been.” And they’re slow to accept that.

The story in England is really interesting, because obviously the Society of Friends, the largest number are in London. And that’s where, in some ways, the power of the Society of Friends lies in the London yearly meeting — some very, very wealthy Quakers.

They basically take the position of, “Hey, great. Good for you. We’re really pleased that you’ve decided to make slaveholding not part of the religious [inaudible].” There’s hardly any slaveholding in England. So it’s very easy to favour something that has no real cost to you. This also involves giving up slave trading. There were some Quaker merchants who had been involved in the slave trade. But for the most part, not terribly important, and it was easy for them to withdraw themselves from it.

Quakers in England start getting nervous when American Quakers say, “Great. Well, I’m glad you agree with us. Will you please go visit your friends in Parliament and tell them that they should abolish the slave trade?” And the very wealthy, and sometimes politically connected Quakers say, “There’s no way we’re going to do that. We’re not going to draw attention to ourselves. We’re not going to court controversy by trying to have the powers that be legislate against an institution that’s fundamental to the Empire.”

So there’s a big jump from witness within the Society of Friends to carrying the witness outside of the Society of Friends. And if there’s one name to know from this history, it’s Anthony Benezet, who really is in some ways the progenitor of the notion of the activist publicist, who has a political cause that he is going to push through pamphlets, publications, books that he sends all over the North American colonies, all over England. In some ways, what he writes becomes the template for the vast majority of antislavery publications that appear for a two-decade period. He really is that influential.

And one of the things that he does is he takes the Quaker witness and projects it outwards and says that — for reasons that we can talk about — antislavery is not just for Quakers; that the moral and religious witness should apply to the broader society as a whole.

Rob Wiblin: So you have another filter where this movement could have stagnated or died out. I guess you’re saying some of the resistance that they faced was among people who owned slaves themselves, who really didn’t want to hear this message. And then you have other people who might be sympathetic on some level, but are indifferent to some degree to it — in the way that maybe we can understand that people today see lots of terrible things happening, we hear about awful things happening on the news, and that doesn’t necessarily prompt us to take action and decide that this is how we’re going to spend our time and our political power.

Christopher Brown: Exactly. Exactly.

Rob Wiblin: So these barriers in the past hadn’t been overcome by previous people who had been against slavery, personally or in small groups. What do you think was distinctive about this situation that allowed it to gain momentum?

Christopher Brown: So this is where the American Revolution really matters. And it’s a very complicated subject. I’m going to try to make it as simple as possible.

The first thing to say (and in some ways maybe the most important thing to say for the questions we’ve just been talking about) is that when North American colonists start presenting their opposition to new initiatives from Parliament — new laws, new rules, Stamp Act, Sugar Act, enforcement of cutting down and smuggling, all of that — they find it useful to invoke their natural rights. And they do that because they learn quickly that invoking British rights has the effect of saying that British rights means Parliament is sovereign. So if you want British rights, that’s exactly what you’ve got, and Parliament is sovereign — not only in Britain, but in the Empire.

Rob Wiblin: One thing that might be worth adding is that I think in this era, this idea of the rights of Englishmen was gaining greater and greater currency, as Britain itself was becoming more of a constitutional monarchy and Parliament was gaining more sovereignty. So within England, this idea of the rights of an Englishman legally would’ve passed muster potentially, but in the colonies it was more problematic.

Christopher Brown: Yeah. To put it very crudely, in an 18th century political sense, the Constitution is about the conjoined sovereignty of King and Parliament and the power of Parliament, which is obviously a legacy of the Glorious Revolution, and is regarded essentially as constitutionally not only sound, but sacrosanct. You have American colonies essentially challenging the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, and that is something that is very confusing to British observers.

As a consequence, American colonists who don’t like what Parliament does begin to talk about the question of representation, because they say Parliament can’t be sovereign if we’re not represented. And there are whole sets of arguments around that, but there are also arguments about rights that precede parliamentary rule — rights that are natural, that are inalienable. And those are obviously arguments made to try to justify political positions that are having a hard time winning favour on the other side of the Atlantic.

And there are Quaker entrepreneurs, and Anthony Benezet in particular, who hear this political back and forth and say, “Hey, the polemicists are starting to talk about natural rights. Well, if we’re going to talk about natural rights, how about the natural rights of these people?” So it’s a kind of opportunism by Quakers who see an opportunity, in the political controversies that lead to the American Revolution, to take an issue that they have been discussing among themselves and find a wider audience for it.

Now, there are other things that are going on too. There’s also a real change in the third quarter of the 18th century around a revived notion that slavery is unnatural — it is only conventional, it is only convenient, it is only expedient. Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, I’ve come to realise, is just so crucial for a lot of antislavery thought in the third quarter of the 18th century, that’s not Quaker. And that really challenges the basic legal foundations of slavery and narrows the grounds to one of, basically, “Let’s just admit it, we hold slaves because it helps makes us wealthy. And it’s good for everybody but the slaves.”

And so there are a whole set of other arguments that are starting to run in the third quarter of the 18th century, but it’s this Quaker deployment of natural rights discourse that’s being used for other purposes that carries the antislavery message out into a wider arena and in a way that becomes difficult to ignore.

Inevitability and contingency [01:01:33]

Rob Wiblin: I guess here we have another possible explanation for what was distinctive about this time and place. One is that philosophers, political philosophers, this whole society had been kind of incubating this idea of individual rights over time, this idea of natural rights, that probably would have felt quite foreign perhaps in ancient Rome. And so there was this idea on the shelf that people could reach for, that might help to undermine the notion of slavery.

Then you also happened to have this fortunate political situation where the American colonists really wanted to talk about natural rights and embrace natural rights, perhaps not realising that the logical conclusion would be that a huge part of their social order ought to be overturned on that basis.

Then we could ask: was it inevitable that people would come up with the notion of natural rights and individual rights? And why would that be inevitable? Is it a result of religious views or just the result of people spending more time thinking about these issues? Do you want to comment on any of that?

Christopher Brown: Yeah. So this is where we get into the crux of the matter about inevitability and contingency, because the notion of natural rights had been around for a while. It is not a new creature of the 18th century. It had not been thought, by European thinkers, to be extended to enslaved Africans in the Americas.

Now again, I want to say, enslaved Africans in the Americas — the millions of men, women, and children held in bondage — if it had been possible to take a poll, I’m sure they would have said some version of “What is being done to me is a violation of my natural rights or my God-given rights or my sacred rights, or a violation of what the ancestors bequeathed to us, or my rights as a subject of the King of Congo,” any number of reasons.

So natural rights as an ideology was there. You’re right that it was kind of “on the shelf” in this sense. And it’s because natural rights does not lead naturally into antislavery thought and action that I’m sceptical of notions that in the end, at some point, some way, natural rights would have led to antislavery movements. For hundreds of years it had not done so.

And you can even go back further, because as I was saying before, late Roman thought and early mediaeval legal thought regarded slavery as against man’s nature. So again, the moral insight, the legal insight is not in itself particularly new in the late 18th century — it’s the uses to which it is getting put. And the uses are importantly political uses that are acquiring great significance in a new way. So I really think that it’s not so much the idea of natural rights or natural rights ideology, as it is the new ways to which those ideas are being mobilised in this period that’s really crucial for our subject.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Just as an aside, I’ve read through some of your work. It’s pointing out that you can have highfalutin moral philosophy ideas like natural rights, and not apply them and not actually act on them. That is extremely common, really typical, and we see that in our current age. We have lots of ideas that might imply that we should act differently than we do, either individually or as a society, but if it’s costly and difficult, then people can live with the inconsistency between their ideals and their actions, for centuries potentially. And as you were saying, natural rights people could have thought about many centuries earlier, and yet for some reason it only took off as a notion applied to enslaved people at this time.

To make this clear, do you want to give me any examples from the present day of somewhat analogous cases?

Christopher Brown: Yeah. I think about this all the time. And honestly, Rob, a lot of my work on this subject really begins from reflecting on our moral experience in everyday life. I grew up at a time in the United States in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights movement, where there was a lot of discussion about, “What will it take to get another movement going to sort of push the next level of equality?” And I’ve always thought that there can be too easy a linkage between, “If you just get people to think the right way, then they’ll do the right thing.”

And you can see that at the political level, but you also see it at the individual level. Just coming into my office in New York City today, it’s cold. I walked by homeless people on the street, lying on warm grates. This is true for most days in the winter in New York. I see people on the streets struggling in this way. And we walk by them — or I walk by them, I think most New Yorkers walk by them — often sometimes with the thought of, “That’s really awful. That’s really sad. It shouldn’t be this way. Maybe I should do something.” But then I’m late for work, my child is calling me, I’m thinking about what I’m going to have for lunch today. And then we go back to sleep at the end of the day, and we wake up and do the same thing.

And so I think there’s really a great distance between our moral intuitions, and even our moral commitments, and then our moral actions. I think that is something that, in the thinking about antislavery, there had been (and sometimes still is) a too-easy equation of, “Well, once people saw the problem, once they realised the humanity of Africans, once they understood the cruelty of slavery, then of course they would organise and do something about it.” And not only did it not happen that way, but it almost never happens that way.

So when the other thing happens — when there’s a movement of some kind, when there’s a commitment, when there’s a collective effort — that’s the thing that we should regard as strange, and try to make sense of, rather than the routine forms of man’s inhumanity to man, which unfortunately is all too typical, as we know.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. At any point in time, there’s so many awful things in the world that we could potentially dedicate ourselves to. And of course, most people also have relationships, and they have children, and they have to survive themselves. We only have so much capacity that we almost have to tune out most of the terrible things in the world, or it will just be completely unmanageable. That’s to some degree true for us today, and it was true for people in the past as well.

And I guess society as a whole only has so much bandwidth to consider various different public policy issues, various different awful things, so most stuff most of the time is mostly getting neglected. So just for that base rate reason alone, it’s the exceptional case where you get some massive moral and public policy revolution.

Christopher Brown: That’s exactly right. The routine, the everyday, is where there are all kinds of conventions that, on careful reflection, really make us ask, “Why do we do that? Why do we believe that? Why do we accept that?”

Let me give you another example from our own time that I often use in class, which I think crystallises something about how this works. It’s not difficult at all to see the moral and ethical problems with eating meat. And there is a great number of vegetarians, and vegans even — some for health reasons, but some because they really don’t like the thought of eating animals unnecessarily.

Someone like me, who eats a lot of meat: I am wholly aware of all of the ethical, really indefensible grounds for consuming meat as much as I do, and yet I do it anyway. Is it because I’m not alert? Is it because it’s conventional? I like the taste? I’m weak? Lots of people do it? There are all kinds of things around me that justify the choice, right?

It’s not hard to imagine 20, 50, 200 years from now — when the variety of food and food science options are so vast, and the problems of raising animals to eat is so difficult — that people will look back on our time and say, “What was wrong with these people? I mean, they were just eating meat all the time, and they didn’t have to? They must not have understood what they were doing.” No, we know exactly what we’re doing. We know exactly what we’re doing.

Rob Wiblin: And that’s how humans are to some extent. Now and in the past.

Christopher Brown: Exactly.

Moral revolution [01:11:00]

Rob Wiblin: OK, let’s turn back then to this time period when it turned out that there was a moral revolution, that it did pick up steam, did gain a lot of adherence. You’re saying Benezet was a particularly important character?

Christopher Brown: Yeah. It’s Quaker publicists and polemicists who really start pushing the incoherence between the natural rights discourse and the commitment to slaveholding. And they’re very creative and very persistent about drawing leading political figures, leading spokesmen of the colonial cause to think about the issue.

There’s a kind of a self-awareness that begins to develop in the political community in the North American colonies — where they kind of hear how the words sound in their own ears, and they recognise that this is an unpleasant contradiction. And they’ve got various ways of excusing it, some of which are racial, some of which are practical, some of which are denial, evasion, the projection of guilt in other places. But there’s a way that it becomes sort of a feature of the broader public consciousness in the decade before the Declaration of Independence.

And it especially becomes part of the public consciousness because polemicists on the other side of the Atlantic, who think the American rebels are full of it, make the point that, “Listen, you guys don’t actually believe in natural rights. If you believed in natural rights, you wouldn’t be slaveholders.” And again, from England, it’s very easy to say, because there’s basically no slaveholding of any significance in England itself. In the way that British writers and politicians think about it, it’s very much of an American practice.

So what begins to happen is that just as Quakers are saying, “You should give a second thought to the political discourse that you’re pushing because of the commitment to slavery here, and maybe political independence should also mean liberty for enslaved Africans,” you’ve got folks on the other side of the Atlantic saying, “You don’t deserve the liberty that you’re petitioning for because you’re hypocrites. You’re not actually committed to freedom. You’re not actually committed to natural rights. You’re just trying to get out of paying your taxes. You don’t want to actually listen to and obey Parliament. You’re trying to overthrow the constitutional order.”

And so what starts to happen in the years before the Declaration of Independence is an attribution of guilt by British polemicists, saying to North American colonists, “I don’t want to hear your liberty talk from a bunch of slaveholders,” and a political elite in North America that starts saying, in almost kind of a schoolyard way, “Well, there wouldn’t be slaves here if British slave ships didn’t bring them here.” And so what starts to happen is this use of the issue of slavery as a way to say something…

Rob Wiblin: To criticise your political opponent.

Christopher Brown: Exactly. Exactly.

Rob Wiblin: I see. That’s very interesting. So I guess the issue gets polarised, but polarised in such a convenient way that both sides benefit from saying that slavery is bad in some way. Or they’re both throwing it back and forth, insisting that the other is at fault for this atrocity, basically.

Christopher Brown: Exactly.

Rob Wiblin: In so doing, reinforcing the idea that that is wrong. There’s one reason that you think that this wasn’t inevitable: this does just seem like a slightly happy coincidence.

Christopher Brown: It had never been done before. The institution of slavery had never been used this way before. It had never become a kind of arrow in the quiver of political debate. And obviously it draws on an old notion that there is something morally reprehensible about slaveholding and slave trading. The tendency, though, had been to think of that as being — at least in the Atlantic world — as the way it had evolved, kind of how the world worked.

And what starts to happen, because of this political dispute, is that on both sides of the Atlantic, you have propaganda saying, “No, it’s actually your fault. It’s not just how the world works. This wouldn’t happen if you didn’t own slaves. This wouldn’t happen if you weren’t slave traders.” So by redescribing slavery as the fault of particular groups — that this is something that is blameworthy — it opens up the possibilities.

There’s two things. First of all, it establishes the fact that actually it’s not just the way the world works — that it’s the product of human choice. And secondly, that if it’s blameworthy to be committed to slavery, it must also say something good about you if you’re opposed to slavery. So a kind of politics of antislavery emerges out of this contretemps between who’s more at fault. And in figuring out who the bad guys are, there’s also an effort to figure out who the good guys are.

Now, of course, neither side of this political debate has any commitments to antislavery at all.

Rob Wiblin: Really?

Christopher Brown: When they’re making these arguments, they’re not saying that the slave trade should stop, or that slavery should be abolished. What they’re saying is that this practice is somebody else’s problem.

Rob Wiblin: So they weren’t actually against it per se, or they didn’t have some deep moral commitment.

Christopher Brown: No, no.

Rob Wiblin: They were just throwing mud. Is that it?

Christopher Brown: Absolutely. No, this has had nothing to do with being in favour of emancipation or abolition or being concerned about Black people or any of those things. What it was about was using slavery as a way of revealing a character flaw in your political opponents. That’s how it begins.

Rob Wiblin: I see. But this did, I suppose inadvertently from their point of view, create a whole lot of people who did morally oppose slavery, right? Because they were hearing these arguments and then actually interpreting them naturally and correctly.

Christopher Brown: One of the things that happens, of course, is that using the issue this way draws attention to the institution of slavery. People start thinking about it, and it’s like, “Why do we justify this? What are the grounds for it?” There’s a kind of a secondary set of discussions that take place that are specifically about slavery, that are enabled and inspired by these political arguments.

Scholars have long understood that it’s in the 1770s that there’s a kind of antislavery discourse that’s emerging, and it’s emerging at this moment precisely because of the political importance that it acquires. But the thing that I also think is just so important is that when you position something as a sign of…

Rob Wiblin: Depravity?

Christopher Brown: Thank you, yes, of depravity, then to oppose it is to say something about your virtue. Especially first on the American side, when we declare independence, we are also going to be setting slavery on course for extinction. And they either don’t mean it, or don’t realise they don’t mean it, or there are some people who mean it kind of, but it becomes something really useful to say rhetorically in the fight against Britain.

And the British, on the other hand, it happens later there, but ultimately what starts to happen is that the American commitment to slaveholding is proof positive that Britain is different and therefore has a right to rule.

Rob Wiblin: I see. So they mean that, “Britain is different because we don’t have slavery within Great Britain.”

Christopher Brown: “We don’t have slavery here.”

Rob Wiblin: I see. “We’re not like these awful country folk from the sticks.”

Christopher Brown: Exactly. Exactly.

Rob Wiblin: Prepping for the interview, one thing that seemed distinctive about the setup here that could have contributed is that you’ve got the imperial centre in England and Scotland and Wales, and I guess Ireland to some extent, where slavery is not permitted. And I think there would’ve been mass opposition to the introduction of slavery. Not so sure.

Christopher Brown: Well, it’s not so much that it’s not permitted. It’s that it’s…

Rob Wiblin: It’s not legally recognized.

Christopher Brown: It’s actually literally not “permitted” in this sense.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, unlawful.

Christopher Brown: It’s not outlawed. It’s just that it’s not lawful either. So there’s this really interesting sort of legal twilight that slavery exists in, where, because these are British colonists, they come back to England, they come back to Scotland with slaves in tow. And there’s nobody that says that they can’t do that. There’s also no law that says that they can do that.

Rob Wiblin: They had various legal cases, right?

Christopher Brown: Right. Some people will have heard of the Somerset case of 1772. We’re just having the 250th year anniversary of that this year, so there’s been some discussion and new focus on it among scholars.

It really is an important moment, because it’s a decision that essentially involves the question of what powers do slaveholders in England have over their slaves in a society where there’s no slave law? And the judgement is that slaveholders, whatever their powers are, they are not allowed to ship slaves out of the country. Now, if you think about it, if you don’t have the power to dispose of enslaved men or women the way you want, they can run away. There’s no way to recover them. There’s no fugitive slave law. There’s nothing that provides the infrastructure to support slaves. So it’s a judgement that was taken as a sign that English common law did not recognise slavery and would not enforce the rights of slaveholders.

And this happens just in the moment where the existence, the pervasiveness of slaveholding in North America had become really important. So you’ve got, in Scotland and England and Ireland and Wales, a world in which there are no slave laws. There’s no fugitive slave laws. And then on the other side of the Atlantic, slavery is literally everywhere. That contrast becomes in some ways a way of defining national character, with Americans being a different nation even before they’re independent, in part because they’re slaveholders.

Rob Wiblin: I see. So did that facilitate the growth of this attitude? You had this imperial centre where people weren’t exposed to slavery personally as they’re brought up, so then when they hear about it from these other places — and especially when they have a political axe to grind to criticise them — it’s so natural for them to be just like, “Well, we would never allow this. It’s abhorrent.”

Christopher Brown: Exactly.

Rob Wiblin: And so it can gain momentum.

Christopher Brown: But it’s very easy to oppose something that doesn’t involve you or anybody that you know, right?

Rob Wiblin: Right. And that’s why it’s an auspicious setup for the movement, because it can potentially get all these people. And also not just any people, but the people at the centre of political power within this empire.

Christopher Brown: Exactly.

Rob Wiblin: So convenient. Yeah.

Christopher Brown: Exactly.

The importance of specific individuals [01:22:37]

Rob Wiblin: Another explanation that can speak to the inevitability or contingency of it, or one explanation for it taking off, might be that there were individual people who were just incredible firebrands, incredible communicators, who helped to light the spark that spread to other people. It does seem like sometimes you do just get campaigners, occasionally a single person, who really managed to bring an issue into the limelight, where otherwise that might have languished for a while.

Christopher Brown: Yeah. I’ve spent more time than I’d care to admit thinking about this subject. One of the very hardest parts was trying to decide how to deal with the heroes of traditional accounts. Because names that will be familiar to many listeners, that were familiar to many generations of readers of British history — Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce, the Clapham Sect — for the longest time, they were not just the first movers, the progenitors, but also heroes. They were stood in this special place of having revealed, and then mobilised, and then led, and then persisted — and seeing the cause brought to its successful conclusion.

When I first started working on this subject many, many years ago, I was determined not to tell that story. Not only because it’s a kind of a complacent story that by extension becomes a story of national greatness — and as a kind of apology and even justification for empire — but also because I was resistant to the notion that individuals matter in the ways that those kinds of accounts tend to suggest.

If you think about the way people talk about movements today, there’s a real tension: do we celebrate the person who’s the spokesman at the head, or is it the community of leaders that support the lone spokesman? This is especially important in the history of the American civil rights movement. Or is it the rank and file? Is it the people? Is it the foot soldiers? Is it all of the men and women — and especially women, who do all this hidden work to make a movement go? What happens when we focus on leaders and don’t pay attention to everyone else who is pushing a cause? All of these things make writing about the beginning of a movement very complicated.

There are a number of scholars who did this before I started to work on the subject, who really emphasised the popular dimensions of antislavery: that it was a kind of a public will; it was an upswell of opinion that the leaders were in some ways just catching up to. And that if we really want to understand the movement, we need to understand its broad public embrace rather than its figureheads.

I guess this is a long answer to the question, Rob, because I keep saying, “This is the crux of the matter; that’s the crux of the matter.” But this is, in some ways, where the rubber hits the road between an issue that’s become politically important and a movement that becomes politically powerful. And in this particular instance, I really came around to the view that you can’t just talk about it as a popular movement, in which the leaders, the progenitors, are just the surface of what is a great upswell of opinion. To put it crudely: in this instance, movements start somewhere, and they start with particular actors doing particular things.

I have ended up, in the work that I did on this subject many years ago, going back to the story of some of those key individuals to try to understand the position they took as founders of a movement for which there really was not much precedent. I went back to people like Thomas Clarkson, to William Wilberforce, to Hannah More, to some of the elite Anglican evangelicals gathered in later years at Clapham. To less known but really important figures, like James Ramsay or an early activist, Granville Sharp. The movement comes to fruition in the late 1780s because of the choices that those individuals made, and also because of choices that the collectivity of English Quakers made.

And maybe we’ll get into this a little bit, but the challenge, if you want to understand how social movements begin, is to try to figure out what moves the first movers. And my conviction — at least in this case, after spending many, many years researching and writing and thinking about these folks — is that you need to understand them in the round. Not just as abolitionists, but as people with histories, emotions, personalities — and commitments, convictions, values that are not about slavery, but that very much inform the choices they make around slavery.

My thinking about this increasingly migrates towards the biographical. Not with the intention of celebrating heroes, but trying to almost diagnose the peculiar features of personalities who do peculiar things.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. It sounds like you’re leaning towards the view that there were individuals who mattered.

Christopher Brown: Yeah, there were.

Rob Wiblin: That if half a dozen people happen to walk in front of a bus, then maybe the movement could have lost momentum. It seems really hard to tell. This is a very difficult part of counterfactual history. Because I suppose one view is just that you look at this individual who seems to have been a real initiator of things: before they took action, there were far fewer people involved; afterwards, there’s tonnes. The other perspective would be that there were broad social trends, and if it hadn’t been them, then someone else would have filled that niche within society; they would’ve to be the person who spoke up instead. How can we tell?

Christopher Brown: I think the politics of the American Revolution put the question of slavery on the political agenda in a way that was lasting. I don’t think it was possible to — to use the cliché — “put the genie back in the bottle” after the way the issue of slavery gets batted around because of the politics. But it could have worked out a variety of different ways. It did not have to necessarily lead to a push to end the British slave trade beginning in the 1780s. And certainly the success of that effort would not be guaranteed by any means. But I don’t think it was possible after the American Revolution to treat the institution of slavery as a kind of feature of the world, that as a moral issue was no one’s responsibility.

Rob Wiblin: I see. Yeah. Who does seem most decisive, as an individual, if anyone? And why would you think of them as being particularly important?

Christopher Brown: Anybody listening to this discussion who knows the subject is going to roll their eyes when they hear what I have to say, but I don’t think there’s any way that you cannot come back to Thomas Clarkson. The reason why I say that is because he is really the first person who thinks that there should be a national public movement against the British slave trade. And he’s so committed to that purpose that it becomes basically the sole work of his life until it’s achieved in 1807, and there’s no other person who has the same level of vision or same level of commitment to the purpose. That’s the reason why I would identify Clarkson.

I mean, there are very important moments — decisions made by the Quakers immediately after the American Revolution in Britain — which are consequential. There are some really formative antislavery publications by a guy named James Ramsay that shape the debate in ways that are lasting. But as far as the movement goes, I just think that Thomas Clarkson is really essential to what ends up emerging.

Rob Wiblin: From using the language that “the genie couldn’t be put back in the bottle,” it sounds like you think that maybe a very difficult filter to pass — that was passed by that point — was that multiple different, very influential groups in society had found for some decades that it was to their benefit to say that slavery was awful and that the other guys are at fault. And that that really had changed attitudes more broadly, the promulgation of that message by powerful people for so long,

Christopher Brown: It’s very hard to document, but in the immediate aftermath of the American War for Independence, there is a brief but profound couple of years where a reflection on what went wrong is just circulating among the British elite. There is a sense that the loss of North America says that, in one way or another, as the pollsters say, the empire was on the wrong track. It was an indication — either in terms of governance or in terms of orientation or in terms of execution — that the overseas colonies were vulnerable.

And some of those interpreted that as, “We need to look at this question of the slave trade and of slavery in the British West Indies.” That was not the majority opinion by any means, but it kind of created a space for folks who already had reservations to pose questions that had not really been posed before.

Later stages of the antislavery movement [01:33:40]

Rob Wiblin: Let’s talk about the later stages of the antislavery movement. To give people some signposts, you were saying that there was this process, from 1718 through to 1806, where there was this growing public-policy-like movement towards abolishing the Atlantic slave trade. Then it was about another 30 years after that until they got rid of slavery itself in the colonies. Which is a slightly funny thing, that you would say, “This is terrible. We can’t allow this, but then we’re going to continue doing it for quite some time.”

Christopher Brown: There’s 50 years between the beginning of the antislavery movement and the ban on slaveholding in the British Empire. Fifty years is a long time. I mean, think about 50 years from now. That’s more than a lifetime for most of the folks who were involved.

Rob Wiblin: Am I right to think that at this later stage, the main impediment that these campaigners would have been running up against is just the lobbying power of this enormous industry? That there were financial political interests that did not want to be told that they have to shut down their business and lose most of their wealth?

Christopher Brown: Yeah. The proslavery interest was very powerful in Parliament, particularly after slave trade abolition in 1807. In the 18-teens, 1820s, they did a very good job of making sure they had the right friends, especially in the Tory governments that dominated in the 1820s. When there was reform regulation that was proposed, they drew up the regulations to the extent that they could.

Rob Wiblin: Feels very modern somehow.

Christopher Brown: It’s kind of the 19th century version of industries writing the rules that will govern their operations. There were some things that they had to give in on, but as political actors, they were exceptionally, exceptionally skilful.

But they also benefited from a more general value among the British elite, which is the sanctity of private property. It’s very easy to underestimate the importance of the problem of ownership. Slaveholding is abhorrent: you don’t have to go into the ways that the whole idea of owning another person, at any time period, that’s hard to sit with. But from a legal point of view, from the standpoint of the slaveholders, that’s real money that was walking around. It’s a lot of capital tied up in the people that they owned.

And I’ve said this sometimes in class, often to grimaces from students, but emancipation to slaveholders is confiscation. It’s taking other people’s stuff. There’s a more general question about, if we’re talking about freeing the slaves, what does that mean to other forms of property? Not only in the colonies but at home. There’s a kind of sympathy among certain quarters of the elite of, “Well, yeah, slavery’s horrible. But do we really want to get into the practice of just expropriating large inventories of human beings?”

Rob Wiblin: I guess they wouldn’t have called it “class consciousness” then, but it sounds like maybe, among elites who had lots of wealth, seeing other elites losing it all might have made them nervous.

Christopher Brown: This is why when emancipation does come in 1833, it’s with a massive buyout of slaveholders, both resident in the West Indies and resident in Britain, because the preservation of the principle of property runs right through emancipation. The right to purchase and hold property is withdrawn, but the capital sunk in it is recognised and paid for.

Rob Wiblin: You’ve just been laying out all of these reasons why it sounds like they were really up against an extremely difficult task here, even at this late stage.

Christopher Brown: Even at this late stage.

Rob Wiblin: After this mass recognition that this was wrong, and people had been saying it was wrong for quite some time. How did they get lucky? Or what amazing decisions did they make to make it happen?

Christopher Brown: Oh boy. So complicated, Rob. I mean, part of it — in some ways, the most important part of the story, both for slave trade abolition and for emancipation — are shifts in the political climate that actually have nothing to do with the issue of slavery. In 1806, shortly after William Pitt dies, the ministry that’s put together contains a number of politicians — Grenville, Charles James Fox, others — who have been long in favour of slave trade abolition.

Rob Wiblin: For moral reasons?

Christopher Brown: Well, for moral reasons, for political reasons, for some economic reasons that we could discuss. But that’s not the reason why they come into office. But when they come into office, it’s one of the few things that they’re able to get done together. But that’s a ministry that only lasts for a year.

Something similar happens in the early 1830s, where after the reforms that considerably widen the franchise and bring in new members of Parliament in 1832, the political balance is shifted away from the interests of the politicians who had protected the slaveholders for a quarter century. The Reform Act of 1832, its purpose was not to promote or enable emancipation, but that new Parliament was far more open to the lobbying of abolitionists than earlier Parliaments had been.

One thing that’s true is that from 1787 down to 1838, for nearly 50 years, there is an antislavery lobby at work in Britain. It’s a constant feature of British political life. They don’t succeed for large parts of those years, but they’re always there, and there’s always a public which is supportive of antislavery agendas. Whether they’re able to succeed politically has a lot to do with the state of play in politics and the relative balance of power of different political factions. That rise and fall has almost nothing to do with the issue of slavery, but their fortunes have profound influences on what happens to the institution of slavery.

Rob Wiblin: But the fact that this movement kept persisting at it — despite the fact that they weren’t having that much success to start with, and they were up against a lot of opposition — that makes it feel less contingent at this point, because the sense is that, “We’re just going to keep trying until the stars happen to align,” and they’re able to get their way.

Christopher Brown: Yeah, I think that’s right. And this is why I think the moment of the 1780s is so important, because what gets established in the decade after the American Revolution is the belief, the view, the notion that standing in opposition to some aspect of the slave system is a sign of individual and collective virtue — that it says something good about you as a person; it says something good about you as a community; it says something good about you as a nation.

And for most of the folks who take antislavery positions, it’s deeply held. But it’s also in some ways costless, right? The barriers to entry are incredibly low, because most of the impact that people think about is all overseas. There’s a lot of literature, especially from the 1980s, 1990s, that really emphasises all the petitioning: there’s just hundreds of thousands of people signing antislavery petitions in the 1790s, in the first decade of the 19th century. There’s no issue around which the British public was more united than opposing the slave trade, and later opposing slavery — and it crossed class lines and all these kinds of things.

The only thing that stood in the way was Parliament in some ways, and we can talk about why that was the case. But especially from an American point of view, that sounds extraordinary, where antislavery was incredibly divisive. It led to a civil war, obviously. But when you stop and think about it, if you think about a canvasser walking around, I don’t know, Nottingham, with an antislavery petition, saying, “Are you for slavery? Or are you against it?” “Yeah, I’ll sign it. I’m against it.”

Rob Wiblin: That’s an easy sell.

Christopher Brown: That’s easy. It takes on that character in England. It takes on that character of a moral stand.

Rob Wiblin: Every person is against this.

Christopher Brown: A moral stand that you can take that is worthwhile, that is unquestionably morally right and virtuous, but which has no real consequences in supporting. So it becomes a really important part of British national identity in these years.

Rob Wiblin: Inasmuch as it was the Reform Act in the 1830s that gave the franchise to more people and reduced gerrymandering, got rid of rotten boroughs and so on, helped to make the UK more democratic in a sense, then that makes it feel a bit more inevitable. Because I suppose that was a long-term trend that continued. That what happened before and continued after happened in many other countries as well: this kind of incremental increase in the franchise, as countries became more democratic, or as power is distributed somewhat more broadly — potentially as a result of the Industrial Revolution, maybe a contributing factor. Would that have helped to undermine support for slavery more generally?

Christopher Brown: Yeah, I think so. In Western Europe, I think that’s true. The ultimate abolition of slavery in the British Empire is tied up in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848.

What I would say about this is that by the early 19th century, there’s a politics of slavery that has been engaged, especially in the Anglo-American world, where the institution is controversial. It has to be defended. It is attacked on moral grounds, on political grounds, sometimes even on economic grounds. Routinely, it is a matter as a subject of politics in the first half of the 19th century, including democratic politics. I do think that it becomes a kind of a perennial, especially in Britain and the United States. Obviously its resolution takes many decades. But I do think that the politics of slavery are going to lead to some kind of crisis in one way or the other in the two countries at some point in the middle decades of the 19th century or the late 19th century.

When I talk about contingency, Rob, I really mean what I think was most unlikely was the development of a movement in the first place. Once there is a movement, especially the kinds of movements that developed, the chances of it concluding with some sort of legislative attack on the slave trade or slavery obviously becomes far more likely. Because every generation is contesting it, right? But again, you have to think back to what had come before. It had never been contested at all in this form or fashion. The whole question of the future or the shape of slavery in the Americas was not a matter of debate or discussion among the political elite anywhere in Western Europe or in the Americas. It’s this moment of transition in the last quarter of the 18th century that I think is the real pivot point.

Rob Wiblin: Turning point. I see, yeah. Once it’s a constant political issue, it’s likely that eventually it will be undermined.

Christopher Brown: Far more likely, in any case.

Economic theory of abolition [01:46:32]

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, at least much more likely. One whole theory that listeners might be familiar with, that we haven’t really talked about yet, is that people have this economic theory of why it is that the abolition of slavery was going to happen sooner or later. It’s connected to the idea that slavery in some way no longer made sense after the Industrial Revolution, or that processes were set in motion by the Industrial Revolution that would have ultimately led people to begin to oppose it.

Did you want to first explain, better than me, what those theories are?

Christopher Brown: Yeah. This is the myth of inevitable human progress, and it takes a variety of forms. One is that the Enlightenment naturally led to enlightened moral outlooks. Or that economic development, its very logic would lead to the overthrow of slavery. These are the kinds of subjects that historians earn their money debating with other historians. When you get 12 of us in a room, and you’ll get 12 slightly different takes on this subject.

The most famous statement of the economic grounds for both abolition in 1807 and British emancipation in 1833 of course comes from Eric Williams’s book Capitalism and Slavery, which was published in 1944. He describes both abolition and emancipation as driven by the logic of economic change, and that abolitionists had, in many instances, economic motivations. It is a set of arguments that, when written, directly challenged what at that point was a very idealistic notion that abolition and emancipation were essentially the elaboration of British values, and British commitments to liberty, and law, and civilisation — that there was a kind of incipient abolitionism in British culture. Williams, bringing a much more cynical point of view, said, “No, this is an economic motivation from beginning to end.”

This doesn’t get talked about enough, but Williams, when he wrote that in 1944, was drawing on a whole body of thought from the 19th century by Britain’s competitors, especially France and Spain, that were quite sure that especially the abolition of the slave trade was some sort of British stratagem to throw all of the benefits of the plantation economies in the services of British capitalism.

Now, the grounds on which they made that argument is very complicated — I’m not sure we want to get into all of that — but those outside of Britain have been saying that there must have been economic interests at work in the 19th century; that this is not just a story of humanitarianism, and idealism, and religion, and all of those kinds of things. Eric Williams was drawing on that tradition. And it’s an argument that after 1944 was largely ignored for many years, and then challenged intensively in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s by historians — especially economic historians, who, as we say today, “ran the numbers.” It challenged the empirical basis for Williams’s arguments, and still remains a matter of controversy today.

Most of us who work on the subject no longer accept the crudest version of Williams’s formulation — that slave trade abolition was a response to declining profits in the British West Indies — nor is there as ready an acceptance that emancipation was a kind of mercy killing of a dying economy. Not all, but many economic historians who’ve really studied this carefully have argued somewhat counterfactually that if the slave trade had not been abolished, British slavery would have thrived through the 19th century. Slavery in many parts of the British West Indies at the time of emancipation was still flourishing, and could have continued to grow if emancipation had not occurred.

The argument has been challenged on the grounds that the prospects for economic growth — if the slave trade and slavery had remained in place — the prognosis was really, really good. And so abolition and emancipation from that point of view did not make economic sense.

Rob Wiblin: I see. One argument would be that slavery disappeared because it was no longer profitable in some sense, or it was no longer an economically efficient institution from the perspective of slaveholders or of the society in which they’re a part. So that was what drove people to give up on it. Basically, you think that when you run the numbers, or other people run the numbers, it just seems like that’s not the case at all — that it was very profitable, and would have continued to be profitable. It would have been to the military benefit of the British Empire if they’d continued doing this, because they would have made money, and on and on.

Christopher Brown: Yeah. On the military part of it, I’m less sure. But this is one of the real challenges for this kind of subject, Rob: it depends on who and what we’re talking about. Because if you look at the British Empire as a whole, the economic argument for abolition and emancipation were not particularly strong. If you look at particular places, and particular moments, you can see how there would be individual economic interests, that might be a little bit like the Pennsylvanians or New Englanders of an early generation. Which is to say they did not favour emancipation, but they were not as opposed to it as some others might be.

Rob Wiblin: Right.

Christopher Brown: Because there were some colonies — Barbados is a very good example — where it had declined in profitability, especially after slave trade abolition, where slavery had been really weakened.

There are very important strategic reasons — not necessarily economic ones, but strategic reasons — why abolition made sense in 1807. The proportion of the elite who are committed to slavery by the 1820s and early 1830s is declining. There is a growing belief that free labour is morally superior and potentially, it’s argued, economically superior. Now, abolitionists try to make that argument. Slaveholders say, “You have no idea what you’re talking about. You try free labour here, nothing is going to get done.” And they turned out to be largely right.

But there’s a series of economic arguments that start getting made in the 18-teens, 1820s, early 1830s that are questioning the economic utility of slavery. But there is no known instance, at least one that I can think of, in the Americas, where slaveholders decided that they were going to essentially liquidate slavery, abandon it, because it was no longer economically profitable. That just doesn’t happen.

Rob Wiblin: Right. It never happens, which casts doubt on the whole idea.

Christopher Brown: The people who are engaged in the business are quite sure it’s economically profitable, so a bunch of folks who were living somewhere else, saying, “This system has run its course,” well, that might be true to them, but it’s not true to the folks who were actually invested in it. This is the reason why many of us take the view that there’s no reason, absent abolition and emancipation, that the institution could not have run into the early 20th century.

Rob Wiblin: Let’s set that argument aside. That doesn’t make a tonne of sense to me. I’m kind of surprised that people took it seriously, or maybe there’s arguments that we’re missing here.

A different line of argument that feels more intuitive, and I think drives a lot of people’s sense that there must have been an inevitability here, is that isn’t it an awful coincidence that the abolition movement and opposition to slavery took off at the same time and the same place as the Industrial Revolution was occurring? It seems like they happened in tandem, and if there wasn’t any causal connection between them, or they weren’t both caused by some common factor, then it’s just a hell of a coincidence. It makes you wonder. What do you think of that?

Christopher Brown: I’m going to tell you, right now, that I don’t think the last word has been written on the subject at all. I think it’s time for another generation of scholars to come back and reexamine the linkages, with the great increase in empirical information that we have about slavery in the early 19th century in the British Empire, and with a much more refined understanding that we have about the Industrial Revolution. I think in many respects, the jury is still out on this subject.

Williams had the view that slavery provided essentially the startup capital for the Industrial Revolution, and that the industries and captains of industry at the centre of the new manufacturing economies then found it in their interest to turn around and destroy slavery, because it no longer had served its purpose. So there’s both an economic explanation of slavery’s importance to the British economy, and then the British economy turning around and jettisoning slavery when it no longer serves its purpose.

There is no question about the synchronisation between the two developments, although I will point out that economic historians debate among themselves exactly when the Industrial Revolution took place, when it began, and phases of its growth.

Rob Wiblin: It seems like it was quite a gradual takeoff, in a sense.

Christopher Brown: The whole notion of a spectacular takeoff, which was such an important part of the literature when Williams wrote, is no longer the general understanding among scholars who work on the subject today.

Rob Wiblin: So that story you just mentioned there has slavery causing the Industrial Revolution, and then the progression of the Industrial Revolution undermining slavery?

Christopher Brown: The Industrial Revolution turning around and causing the end of slavery. Yes.

Rob Wiblin: Something that’s a little bit surprising about that is that slavery can’t be sufficient for the Industrial Revolution, because slavery was in almost all times and all places throughout history, and yet it’s only there that we saw this particular style of industrial revolution. So I suppose that doesn’t rule it out being a necessary factor.

Christopher Brown: It’s an aspect of Williams’s argument that has not aged terribly well. Williams did something really interesting with this subject, and it will sound familiar. Most of what he did is he identified major bankers, major industrialists who also had major investments in the British West Indies. Sometimes it’s plantation owners, sometimes it’s merchants dealing with plantations. He did what we think of today as naming names, essentially: connecting particular individuals who would become really important to the new manufacturing economies — to finance, to insurance, to industry — and showing their ties to the plantation economies. That work continues apace when people study who held slaves at the time of emancipation in 1833.

The problem is that it’s not easy to segregate capital flows. There’s no way you can say that slavery alone — obviously, for the reasons that you just described — was sufficient for an industrial revolution. There are many places where there are significant profits related to the slave economy that did not industrialise in the way that Britain did. The Netherlands is the most famous, important case for thinking about a counterexample. But in some ways, it’s not an argument that it’s sufficient, or even that it’s necessary.

Rob Wiblin: It’s less counterfactual history and more just a description of the mechanism?

Christopher Brown: But in this particular case, when you look at the beginning of a private banking sector, essentially, when you look at the development of insurance, when you look at the manufacturing economy, and ties to the plantation world — to the plantation complex, to the export of commodities, to the plantation colonies, to the imports of commodities from the plantation colonies — you see a extensive relationship between them, and you could try to quantify them. And the question of small ratios, large ratios, how important: these are the sorts of things that economic historians will argue about from sunrise to sunset.

But what we understand better now is that the British economy was closely tied to an overseas economy that was organised around the plantation complex. Now, I think it would be wrong to say slavery caused the Industrial Revolution. Nobody would say that. I think profits from it played a role, for certain, but there’s no one single cause of the Industrial Revolution.

Rob Wiblin: The thing that’s always seemed odd about that line of argument to me is that, no doubt the Industrial Revolution required some level of saving and capital investment, but it seems like that could have been supported through whatever profitable industries existed — including other ones that would have existed in the absence of slavery, and did exist even in the presence of slavery. It’s true that inasmuch as lots of GDP was being generated through enslavement, then of course that is going to end up being intertwined. But any profits could have served that role.

Christopher Brown: Yeah. This is what economic historians get into. I’m not going to be able to give you the exact figures on this, but some of the argument goes that the margin of increase in trade was driven by the slave economy, and so the level of capital which was swimming in the British economy in the middle decades of the 18th century, because of slavery, made it more likely for industrialisation. Because when talking about industrialisation, you’re talking about capital investment, but you’re also increasing the scale of production, right?

The question of scale of production is closely related to the size of the markets you have to sell in. Those markets are in part about the success of the colonies that are overseas — since those are essentially closed markets, captive markets — not to mention whatever you can do to push those commodities, those manufactured goods into other overseas markets.

It’s such a complicated question. The truth lies somewhere between the Industrial Revolution was completely independent of the overseas slaving economy, and it was entirely dependent on it.

Influence of knowledge work and education [02:02:30]

Rob Wiblin: OK, let’s talk about a different mechanism that would have had a degree of inevitability about it, which is: as the world has industrialised over the last 250 years, we see a consistent shift in the values that people have. Well, there’s one particular framing of this from the World Values Survey folks. Have you seen this stuff before?

Christopher Brown: No. I have never seen this.

Rob Wiblin: Basically, it seems like as countries get richer and more educated, they tend to shift from values that are focused on survival in a hard world towards valuing more self-expression. They also tend to move from more traditional religious values to more secular, modern values — the kind of values that you might have in Denmark or Sweden, as opposed to society 500 years ago.

It seems like there is this general trend that you see across many different places and times. And it makes you wonder, maybe there is something that is quite consistent about what changes about human psychology or human behaviour you get when people are engaged in knowledge work, or they’re engaged in industrial work as opposed to agricultural work, or when they have more time than before to inform themselves, to consume media, and so on.

This might be a story where you have the Industrial Revolution driving changes in the kinds of work that people do, and the kinds of education that they can receive, and the amount of time that they have, and also the economic slack that they have to express their values. And that that might have driven people to, over time, decide that whatever benefit they might have been getting out of slavery, on balance, they’re against it, because it violates their values too much.

Do you place any stock in this style of argument?

Christopher Brown: Not at all.

Rob Wiblin: Wow. OK, go for it.

Christopher Brown: I think it’s demonstrably untrue. Well, let me put it this way: it might be true in some instances, but I would not describe it as some universal law of values in human civilisation. I mean, this is not my field or my subject, but as I understand it: wealth, art, creativity — Weimar Germany. There are all kinds of counterexamples.

I would also just say, the wealthiest nations in Europe in the 18th century were deeply committed to slavery. Slavery has been a producer of wealth, and slaveholding societies have produced artistic marvels in many instances. I’m no expert on Roman civilisation, but my suspicion is that there was no wealthier and increasingly more secular world with the kinds of cultural expression that you’re talking about. And that was the largest slaveholding society that had probably existed in the world at that point.

I just think that’s hopeful. I think I’d go even further and say it’s wishful thinking. I don’t think there’s a real tie. I also think even more that it’s tied to a notion, as far as I can tell, that wealth in one place, in one way or another, redounds to the wealth of others in other places. I just don’t think that that’s necessarily true.

The other thing you might think about is that the age of high imperialism in Britain, France, Germany in late 19th, early 20th centuries were extraordinary concentrations of wealth — and were dependent upon the oppression, the colonialism throughout sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, South Asia. And the artistic production, the creativity of Belle Peau France, Edwardian England. There are too many examples of the ways in which wealth has been built on, and then contributed to the exploitation and immiseration of other people that I have a hard time accepting that as a linkage.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. One thing that’s inconsistent with this is that, obviously, in history further back, the people who engaged in the most human bondage were often the very wealthiest. You might have thought they would be the ones who would be most opposed to slavery, but it seems like they weren’t.

And it’s also true that in the modern world, rich countries often engage in all kinds of atrocities of their own. You’re pointing to colonialism in the 19th century: that as these countries got richer, they used that power to oppress people on an even grander scale than what had previously been possible, rather than going to university, and realising that colonialism was wrong. That wasn’t the path that things took.

Christopher Brown: It’s not something that I really believe in, but if you wanted to run this argument, you would make a case that it’s the middling classes, it’s the bourgeoisie where the energy for these kinds of movements emerge. “Class warfare” is not quite the right word for it, but I do think there is a fair amount of resentment of the kind of wealth and power that slaveholders enjoy because they own slaves. Most of the constituency at the broader level is for those who are wealthy enough to be engaged in politics, but not wealthy enough to own slaves. That’s certainly true in the middle and northern United States by the early 19th century. I think it’s a lot of the rank and file of abolitionist, and then emancipationist, convictions in Britain.

If you wanted to run an argument that really emphasised economic development, I think it’s too crude, and I think it only goes so far. But you could make an argument that the democratisation of politics brings in a group of folks who are less inclined or less sympathetic to the kinds of privileges that slaveholders under an ancien régime enjoy. Now, I don’t think democratic revolutions are inherently hostile to slaveholding; the United States is essentially a slaveholding republic. But I do think that the way it works out in certain places, depending on the socioeconomic configurations, if you want to think about long-term economic development, that would be the place that I would look for it.

Rob Wiblin: OK, yeah. We’ll stick up a link to this Inglehart–Welzel world culture map that I was somewhat referring to, for listeners who are interested in looking at that.

I think I might have slightly led us astray by using the self-expression values, because it’s meant to wrap in all kinds of different shifts in attitudes, particularly from thinking that people should follow cultural norms towards thinking that individuals should be more free to do what they want. I’m representing here arguments that listeners have sent in, by the way.

Christopher Brown: Sure, no problem.

Rob Wiblin: These are the things that apparently have jumped to people’s minds when they’ve read What We Owe the Future.

Moral foundations theory [02:10:17]

Rob Wiblin: Let’s look at it a different way. One popular model of human moral psychology is called moral foundations theory. It’s kind of that we have a specific list of evolved fundamental moral intuitions that are sometimes in conflict with one another, and sometimes stronger, and sometimes weaker. The most common list that psychologists offer is that number one is Harm/Care — sort of a utilitarian, don’t-want-to-hurt-other-people thing. Then there’s Fairness/Cheating — sort of reciprocity. You’ve got Liberty/Oppression, Authority/Subversion. The fifth one is Loyalty/Betrayal, and the sixth one is Sanctity/Degradation — something about spirituality.

Now ideally this is just intended to be kind of neutrally descriptive, almost like a personality test, seeing how strongly you feel these different moral intuitions. And on this one, it seems like as countries have gotten richer, there’s been a trend in people’s opinions, where they tend to place more weight on the Care/Harm and Fairness/Cheating moral intuitions and also sometimes on the Liberty/Oppression axis, and somewhat less on Authority, a bit less on Loyalty, and a bit less on Sanctity/Degradation, spirituality and so on.

And if that general trend were true, then you might think that it seems like concern about Fairness and Harm are the moral intuitions that are most going to push people towards abolitionism. And perhaps it’s only the moral belief in Authority and hierarchy that could ever really cause people to think that slavery could be acceptable. So if you did have this trend towards people placing greater weight on those moral intuitions, then perhaps that would have, over time, caused people to become less favourable towards slavery.

Do you have any reactions to that?

Christopher Brown: Yeah, I’m thinking about that. I’m thinking about that. Certainly a feature of antislavery thought, and a common element in antislavery argument, especially in England, is what you’ve identified as the Harm axis. There’s a lot of propaganda, antislavery pamphlets that emphasise the cruelty, emphasise the barbarity, emphasise the physical violence, emphasise the suffering as the reason to care, and then the reason to act. And on the Fairness part, sometimes that expresses itself in the notion of human equality — that equality means that the grounds on which people are treated goes in some ways into the equality under law, right? Those are elements that are in antislavery argument.

But the question in my mind is: Are they prior or are they posterior consequences of antislavery movements? Because, as you say, these in some ways are not new. The Harm one is actually very interesting, because in the 18th and early 19th centuries in Anglo-American culture, there is a real turn against the most bloody of punishments, right? Capital punishment goes behind closed doors. There’s no more hanging trees. The whole drawing and quartering people, the most dramatic displays of torturing and destroying the human body, all those things become too squeamish for people over the course of the 18th and low 19th centuries. And the turn against slavery is part of that, I agree with that.

But I guess my question is: Is the antislavery movement the product of that or a cause of it? Does it facilitate the growth of that culture of sensibility, or does it arise from it? And I think it’s as much a contributor to that ethos as it is… I mean, to give you a very concrete example: the lash in the Royal Navy. You could be whipped 70, 80 times. We think about whipping on the plantations as something that happens to slaves, but sailors could be whipped basically up to and sometimes to their death, and captains would be legitimate and have the right to do so. The turn against whipping in the Navy is in part a consequence against the turn against whipping in slavery. It’s not that the things that you’re describing don’t occur. It’s that I think the causal sequence is more complicated than that model would seem to suggest.

Let me give you one example that just occurred to me. The whole idea of gender equality in the 19th century, and women’s rights, comes directly out of the campaign against slavery. So again, I think antislavery serves as a progenitor of new ideas of equality as much as it is a product of them. Now, here’s a counterfactual for you: What does the movement for women’s rights look like in the 19th century if the campaign against slavery had never existed? I would argue that there would have been a movement towards greater equality, but it was certainly galvanised and learned a lot of lessons from the antislavery movement.

Rob Wiblin: So one model here places the abolition movement at the beginning of these various liberation movements, and then says maybe it set off a chain reaction to some extent.

Christopher Brown: I do think that’s part of the story.

Rob Wiblin: And I guess the other one is saying that it’s increasing education and wealth that are driving these things each in turn. Actually, another objection that I had to this, at least about the inevitability — and actually this is kind of consistent with the story where slavery is the prime mover — is that, yes, on this planet with our common culture, this is the track that we got onto as we got richer. This is how people decided to use their wealth, or this is what became morally fashionable within elite culture and among the most powerful countries.

But it doesn’t have to be the case that as people get richer, this is how they decide to use that slack. As you’re pointing out, it’s like the Nazis in a sense were very rich, and as they became more powerful they didn’t decide to use it for compassionate ends. I suppose also you’ve got ancient Romans, who were richer than other surrounding societies, and they used it to operate coliseums and all kinds of barbarities. So if there’s a trend from wealth toward compassion for all, at least it can’t be so overwhelmingly powerful that we can’t imagine a counterfactual world where things might have gone in a different direction.

Christopher Brown: Yeah. And there’s the historical point, but then there’s some of the consequences of the historical point. I think it’s very easy to believe, and comforting to believe, that the course the world is on is of improvement. And I think that with growing wealth, with growing technology, we will figure out new ways to solve problems. We’ll address problems that have never even been recognised as problems, because they seemed beyond our capacity. I think those things are true. But you’re still dealing with human beings and human nature, and we as a species have the capacity for great kindness, individually and collectively, but also extraordinary cruelty. And we find all kinds of ways and reasons to do that.

And what makes it even more complicated is sometimes, we are cruel in our kindness. I’m thinking especially about what happens in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The identity that Western Europe acquires as the part of the world that abolished slavery then becomes the alibi, maybe even the apology, for colonising the less developed world. “We’re here to stamp out slavery in Africa. We’re here to bring economic development. Oh, it just so happens to serve our economic interests as well.” There’s a whole series of ways that slavery gets disguised in the 19th century, where you have functional slavery without legal slavery. And at the same time, there is a kind of a celebration of, “See? We abolished it. There’s no more slavery anymore.” Even though things that are almost indistinguishable are operating under the same cover.

So I just think that there’s a certain amount of vigilance that we need — guarding against our worst instincts as individuals and as societies — and a certain amount of humility about, when we are sure of our moral purposes, where our blind spots lie. What is it that we are not noticing? What damage might we be doing in the service of improving things? One aspect of the record of the modern era is of great damage done in pursuit of worthy causes. And there’s also extraordinarily worthy causes where there is real progress, there is real change.

One of the things I sometimes say in class is that the fact of the matter is, on the subject of slavery, there is no question about human progress over the last 200 years. This is indisputable. There is no place on the planet right now where slavery is legal. There are lots of places where slavery operates, but everybody who’s doing it has to do it underground. So this is an unqualified good. This is real progress. And yet at the same time, I can tell you that in the name of abolishing slavery, a whole lot of other stuff happened that brought new evils to the world.

Figuring out how contingent events are [02:21:03]

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. This connects a lot with a discussion at the start of my conversation with Bear Braumoeller a couple of episodes back that listeners might be interested in going and checking out if they haven’t already. We talk about the legacy of the Enlightenment, and talk about how what a mixed blessing it was — how, while maybe it is good in the long run and brought about many positive effects, it was an incredibly rocky road and also encouraged all kinds of bad things in the meantime, at least on an expansive understanding of what the Enlightenment was. I think the alternative to some degree is slightly cherry picking the parts of it that you want to say are the Enlightenment and ignoring the parts that you don’t want to own.

Christopher Brown: We could play this with almost anything, and I think even posing the questions points out the… “absurdity” may be too strong. But the rise of Christianity: good or bad? Columbus’s crossing of the Atlantic: good or bad? Well it kind of depends on who you ask and what you’re interested in, right? I don’t think these things are resolvable in very simple moralistic terms. I mean, heck, you could have the same conversation with the Reformation: good or bad? My suspicion is that there are different answers to that in Canterbury than there are in Rome. The world is too complex, and people are too diverse, and their experiences are far too complicated and varied to — at least from a historian’s point of view — simplify things in the ways that those kinds of analyses require.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. I think we actually come down to concluding that, well, everything in the modern world is directly or indirectly a result of the Enlightenment more or less by this stage, so it almost becomes impossible to ask, or the question does slightly lose its meaning.

In prepping for the interview, I was trying to think, how would one tell how contingent an event like this is? It’s a very difficult question. One that occurred to me is that if we saw that on all conceptually related issues to abolitionism, we were also seeing independent movements springing up, pushing for them as well, that would suggest a pattern where perhaps there was a common cause to all of these.

On the other hand, if we see that we achieve abolitionism, and yet many other conceptually related moral changes don’t happen, and maybe even haven’t happened to this day, then that suggests that maybe the abolitionists just happened to get lucky. Maybe it was an intellectual fashion that could have happened or could not have happened.

And I think that’s kind of an interesting question to ask: To what degree are we consistent in following through on the moral convictions that might have driven this, versus has society globally just cherry picked particular issues that take off, and some others don’t, and so things could have gone a different way?

Christopher Brown: Yeah, I’m not sure what to say about that. I mean, one thing I think you should know, and your audience should know, is that the conclusions I’ve reached on this subject come from many years of writing and thinking. Sometimes there are arguments where you know what you want to say and then you find your ways to support it. This is a view that emerged out of many years of thinking about the subject and the problem.

So in the crudest possible sense, every aspect of human affairs is contingent, right? I mean, what does the world look like if Napoleon’s parents never met? You can play this kind of game forever. On the other hand, you can do the thing of, but in the end, the evolution of human society was going to bring us to a particular point. And really, in some ways, it’s a matter of where you look. Are you looking at the most micro of scales, or the most macro of scales?

To me, the reason why I think about the emergence of antislavery campaigns as contingent is because there’s no real precedent and there’s no real comparison at the time. So it’s not building on anything else that’s like it. And not only that, it was largely unimaginable before it occurred, right? So that’s the first part of it. The second part of it is that the circumstances are circumstances that were very particular to that moment that enabled it. I really believe that slavery is an institution, a set of practices, so normal in human civilisations down to the 18th century that it took something special for it to become controversial and a target for intervention.

I don’t think that every movement is equally contingent. I would say, for example, that I think manufacturing, the sort of industrial development, is less surprising retrospectively than the challenge to slavery and the end of slavery. I’ll just put it that way. I think the development of a women’s rights movement in the 19th century is less surprising, given the development of an antislavery movement in the decades before. This is hardly my field, but you might say that World War II is not terribly surprising, given the settlement of World War I. Now, I’m sure there are people who would get into the contingencies of that.

Let me put it another way. The grounds that folks have offered for thinking that slavery in one way or another was going to end in the 19th century because of 18th century trends are just not convincing if you know the 18th century and you know the 19th century. It’s just not convincing that as of 1750, that this was the direction that things were likely to go by 1850.

Rob Wiblin: Do you think that people in general underestimate how chaotic the past was? I’ve listened to a bunch of lectures recently on British history from the 15th, 16th, 17th centuries, independently of this, and it really feels like it was just all over the place.

Christopher Brown: Yeah. I mean the past is just incredibly complex, like the present is incredibly complex, and our capacity to know about it is very fragmentary. So everything that we’re discussing is the best I can understand based on what I’ve read and what I know.

One of the things that historians are very well aware of, that I think the more general public might not be aware of, is that understandings of subjects change. I mean, I’m doing a lot of work on the Atlantic slave trade right now. Historians know a lot more about the Atlantic slave trade now than they did 25 years ago. A lot of things that were kind of true are just not true in the same way anymore. And that may be true for lots of subjects 25 years from now. So we’re engaged in the exercise of just trying to understand the past better — not to have the last or final word on the subject, but to suggest what the next word looks like. So yeah, it’s super complex, it’s super complicated.

Least bad argument for why abolition was inevitable [02:28:41]

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. So I’ve tried advancing some theories that abolitionism was less contingent. If you had to make that argument — that abolition of slavery was inevitable — what would you find the least bad of the various different arguments, or the most persuasive?

Christopher Brown: That’s an interesting question. I’ve never thought about it. Inevitability is also an argument one way or another about points of no return, so inevitability is also a statement about when does something become the working out of certain sorts of consequences that are built into an event or a moment? I could imagine a line of argument, that I don’t quite believe, that said that antislavery was inevitable because of the American Revolution. That’s actually not my view, but I could imagine a line of argument that made that case. From a macro standpoint, from the standpoint of cultural change, or economic change, or religious change, I don’t-

Rob Wiblin: It’s a hard case to make.

Christopher Brown: I think it’s a really hard case to make. One line of argument that gets a lot of air is that the inefficiencies of slave labour in the end would have become problematic in industrial economies.

Rob Wiblin: And I suppose maybe even more so in a knowledge economy.

Christopher Brown: Or even more so in knowledge economies.

Rob Wiblin: It’d be very hard to run McKinsey with coerced labour.

Christopher Brown: Well that’s right, and also I think the other part, that’s actually even more interesting in some ways, is with the development of robotics. So that some of the drudge labour, to the extent that it can be mechanised, makes human inputs less necessary. The problem with that line of argument, to the extent that it has merit, it misses the ways that slavery was much more than an economic institution. It’s also a strategy of difference and domination. Many slaveholding societies have actually organised themselves around the possession of slaves as luxury items. The predominant slave in human history is not the strong man, but the young girl or the child. The extent to which slavery has served the purposes of sexual exploitation has never been taken fully into account and evaluated, in part because in most cultures it’s not terribly easy to document.

The ways in which slavery has been used to acquire and incorporate young people who then can become loyal servants of the powerful… Think about the kinds of stories that get told about child soldiers in sub-Saharan Africa. Now put that on steroids in the wealthiest parts of the world, and imagine legions of soldiers built up out of captive boys taken at the age of seven and eight, and given the means of destruction with the most powerful weapons, and told “You’re the shock troops for whatever work we’re going to do.” Slavery is extraordinarily malleable as a set of practices and institutions, and even if it over time had become economically less useful, it would’ve been useful to the slave owners.

And just think about services. The knowledge economy also goes with the growth of the service economy. It’s not hard to imagine service economy positions. Certainly there were in households. In elite households, all the service in the American South was done by slaves. True in Brazilian households. Bureaucrats in the Roman Empire, many of the positions that we think of today as good government jobs were filled by slaves. And that’s certainly true for a lot of the most powerful west African states in the 19th century.

So I just think that even if it was economically likely to become less useful in some ways, it’s wishful thinking to believe that if it had been possible to exploit people in this way legally, that people would not have done so.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, I’m with you on that. I don’t really understand the logic of this argument. Especially when you realise how much sophisticated knowledge work was done through coerced labour throughout history, it doesn’t make a tonne of sense.

Were any major moral shifts inevitable? [02:33:37]

Rob Wiblin: By way of contrast, can you think of any major shifts in moral attitudes that you think were more inevitable or nearly inevitable for some reason or other?

Christopher Brown: Such an interesting question, Rob. I mean, you and everyone else will have figured out what a sceptic I am about the inevitability of cultural progress. In some ways I think that should be a counsel of hope rather than despair, because I think it says that it’s really up to us, rather than just letting the passage of time and the generations improve things. Things change because they’re made to change, rather than because the changes are inevitable, inescapable.

I’m thinking hard on that question. I do think that there is a chain reaction, and that certain kinds of changes make other kinds of changes more likely. For example, I do think that, as I said earlier, women’s rights became far more likely on the heels of movements concerned with the rights of enslaved people. And you can actually see these chain reactions even more recently, right? The civil rights movement, in the United States anyway, in important ways made possible the gay rights movement. Could rights for gays and lesbians have been possible absent the civil rights movement? Yeah, I’m sure. But was it more likely because of the civil rights movement? Yeah. So sequence kind of matters for these things, and it’s not clear that you can segregate one off from the other.

I’m not sure what I think about this, but you might even say that in the longest possible term, Christianity made antislavery more likely, even though it took 1,500 years for that to get worked out. Things do build on each other. But I don’t know. Is there something that I can think of that I would be willing to cast as inevitable? I think my answer shows that it’s hard to filet out one issue as if it’s not related to other issues, right? You can’t do the experiment of, “Let’s hold everything else constant and just look at this one thing.”

Rob Wiblin: There’s so many causal connections between them. That Christianity question was the one that I actually cut off a few hours ago. We were talking about that, and I was saying that some people have suggested that there was something about the moral message and the theology of Christianity that provided kindling, I suppose, for people to oppose slavery. It maybe wasn’t inevitable, but it made it easier for people to make the argument in Christian societies, relative to some other religions, both that exist now and ones that had existed before Christianity. Do you place much weight on that line of argument?

Christopher Brown: So listen, if we were in a formal debate and that was my side of the argument, I could try to make that case. And I think there are some points in its favour. The problem is the empirical problem. You can talk about the logics or the explicit values, or the ramifications of a certain orientation towards an understanding of humanity and understanding of God, and understanding of the inheritance of the Old Testament, and understandings of the new revelations, and say, “Here lies the seed of which the antislavery movements would emerge.” And there’s just no challenging the fact that the first antislavery movements invoked the Gospel to make their case. So all that’s true. The problem is the empirical point that Christians created slavery in the Americas.

Rob Wiblin: For something inevitable it took an awful long time.

Christopher Brown: Right. So the churches were major slaveholding institutions. The Christian theologians defended slavery repeatedly over a millennium and a half. Like, “Well, that wasn’t the real thing. The real thing was just waiting to come out.” It’s like, well…

Rob Wiblin: Sometimes the real thing doesn’t necessarily come out, ever.

Christopher Brown: Yeah. Certainly it requires a great deal of selectivity to find. Not just denial or evasion. Just in the same way it requires selectivity to say that Christianity is a religion of massacres, and Christians just go around massacring people, and that’s what Christianity is. I mean, very selectively, you could go through and find that. But you’d have to leave a lot out.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. It’s been a very, very intense three hours. I feel very happy to talk about all of these things with you, but should let you go and do some other work.

It’s a very grim topic. I feel like it would be great to finish on a high note somewhere, if we can find something positive.

Christopher Brown: I often tell my students that my job is to depress people, and that I’m very well rewarded for always being the downer. Look, it is a very depressing topic. It’s not easy to talk about the history of slavery and the slave trade, not only for what it was but also for its legacies in the modern day.

Our wrestling with the legacies in the modern day don’t become easier by refusing to look at the history, by avoiding it, or having complacent notions about how the world changed. I think we need to watch ourselves individually, and watch the worlds that we live in and the people that we elect, and think about what harms we do or what harms we authorise or permit, because they just seem basic to the world in which we live. And I think that’s one of the lessons of these histories.

But I also want to come back to something I said a few minutes ago, about how if you take away the notion of inevitable cultural progress, then what you put in is the necessity of human action, individually and collectively. To put it crudely, the world gets better or worse on the choices we make individually and collectively — not because things are just sort of trending in the right direction.

So a sober look at that history is in some ways a call to get to work in whatever sphere we inhabit, whatever our resources are, to find ways to identify the things that matter to us and try to leave them better than we found them. To the extent that things are better now than they were before, that’s how we got here. So I think there’s, if not a cause for hope, a cause for action that comes out of thinking about these stories.

Rob Wiblin: My guest today has been Christopher Brown. Thanks so much for coming on The 80,000 Hours Podcast, Christopher.

Christopher Brown: Thank you, Rob.

Rob’s outro [02:41:27]

Rob Wiblin: Alright if you’d like to explore related ideas I can recommend checking out:

• 134 – Ian Morris on what big picture history teaches us

• 102 – Tom Moynihan on why prior generations missed some of the biggest priorities of all

And of course

• #136 – Will MacAskill on what we owe the future

All right, The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced and edited by Keiran Harris.

Audio mastering and technical editing by Milo McGuire.

Full transcripts and an extensive collection of links to learn more are available on our site and put together by Katy Moore.

Thanks for joining, talk to you again soon.