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#145 Classic episode – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable
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- [00:00]
A
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to our next holiday classic episode from back in 2023. Historian Christopher Brown is among the world's top experts on the Atlantic slavery abolition movement. But this is not exactly an episode just about slavery. It's an episode rather about whether we should reasonably expect to get more progress for free. Christopher here makes the case that the abolition of slavery was a genuinely contingent historical event, that there are nearby possible worlds that you and I could be living in where. Where it simply never happened and where we would still have legal slavery today, despite also having all of the technological advances that we enjoy today. The broader point that Christopher is arguing is that becoming richer or spending more time at university doesn't push that strongly in favor of moral enlightenment. And that moral attitudes don't just always monotonically progress towards greater compassion, but that they do often also regress towards our basic instincts or just remain stubbornly stuck where they happen to be. If he's right, and you'll have to decide how convinced you are, then we just can't coast on the assumption that humanity is going to figure out the right values to act on given time, given a couple more centuries to do it, or some smart AI chatbots to talk to. And epic. Christopher also has a lot to say about the gap between attitudes and actions. Why, as he sees it, awareness of a problem roughly never translates into a movement to fix what people don't like and what it actually takes for the rare successful movement to get off the ground. Keep in mind if you're watching rather than listening to this, that this was an episode from three years ago. So it's a video episode from long before we were typically doing video. And so it's not the same visual feast you might be used to enjoying if you've been regularly watching the show on YouTube this year. With that small caveat out of the way, I bring you Christopher Brown on whether the abolition of slavery was or wasn't inevitable.
- [01:46]
B
I've taken the view that, 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. 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 it was a norm rather than an exception. What happens in the 19th century, I really think is quite unusual, and I don't think it's the natural consequences of either economic forces or cultural forces.
- [03:01]
A
Today I'm speaking with Christopher Leslie Brown. Christopher is a professor of history at Columbia University specializing in the history of the British empire during the 17th and 18th centuries in, in particular, slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, and the movement for its abolition. Years ago, he did his DPhil at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship before returning to the US to work at Rutgers University, then Johns Hopkins University, and finally Columbia University, where he teaches and supervises doctor students on these topics to this very day. He's the author of Moral Foundations of British Abolitionism, as well as Arming Slaves from the Classical Era to the Modern Age. And he's written for the New York Times, the London Review of Books, among many other outlets. Thanks for coming on the podcast, Christopher.
- [03:37]
B
Very glad to be here. Thank you for the invitation.
- [03:40]
A
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?
- [03:50]
B
Yeah, so right now, I've now turned to working on the Atlantic slave trade itself, and I'm increasingly looking at the experience of European men who are 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. And 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.
- [04:32]
A
Wow. So these are the descendants of people who were leading the slave trade in West Africa basically a few centuries on?
- [04:41]
B
Yes. Yeah. I mean, 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. And 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 3rd, 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. 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?
- [06:01]
A
Seems like 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, towards trying to understand the 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?
- [06:25]
B
Yeah. I mean, it's a movement that's been going on for some time now. You know, it's sort of, you know, in the profession we talk about social history, which is really trying to get at the lives of, you know, of people who don't leave papers, who are not famous, to try to get at the, 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. And so you have to be very creative and very determined to try to recover some aspects of that experience. And 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 kind of 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. And so 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.
- [07:51]
A
So you were saying that there are these descendants of these slave traders in West Africa today. What are.
- [07:57]
B
Yeah, I wasn't quite saying. I mean, I wasn't quite. I mean, my point is less that. Well, yes, I mean, the Atlantic slave trade does not work without West African elites capturing and selling folks. And so, yes, there are descendants of slave traders in West Africa. Let's just say that there are descendants of slave traders in Europe and the Americas. This is an issue that sometimes confuses people. And 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. And so it's in some ways a kind of an international, economically privileged group that's battening on a very vulnerable group of people and selling them into slavery in the Americas.
- [08:52]
A
Yeah, okay. We'll come back to some of these themes in a minute, but it might be good to wind back a little bit to the start.
- [08:58]
B
Yeah, no, absolutely.
- [09:00]
A
We'll get some context for the conversation and then maybe you zoom out a little bit about. Think about slavery as a historical phenomenon. So, yeah, a bit of background that might be useful for some listeners is one reason we're talking today is that Will McCaskill, regular guest on the show, cited work quite a bit in his book from this year, while We Are 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. And this is part of Will's argument that we can't just assume that moral values are always going to improve and are going to necessarily get better as technology advances, and that we should actually have some level of fear that in fact things might go in a bad direction in future, or that perhaps 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. So, yeah, 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 anti slavery 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 kind of reviews and commentary that I've seen. 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. And then people think about that and they generate specific economic and kind of cultural arguments to explain why that feels intuitively so wrong to them. You want to comment on that first?
- [10:28]
B
Yeah. I mean, it's obviously a big topic and it's one of these subjects that by its very nature can't be proved or disproved. Right. We don't know. 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 anti slavery movements had not arisen at the end of the 18th century, if the British slave trade had not been abolished in 1807, 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 kind of 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 slave holding societies to saying that they had had enough and they weren't gonna 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. It took different shapes in different times. And so what happens in the 19th, and this is sort of big picture, but what happens in the 19th century I really think is quite unusual. And I don't think it's the natural consequences of either economic forces or cultural forces.
- [12:30]
A
Okay, I guess, yeah. Inasmuch as one of the arguments is that it was just incredibly profitable. There was an enormous industry, an enormous amount of money invested in this. Maybe 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 from an economic point of view. So there's a lot, there's a massive industry arrayed against that, against that notion. Do you think that's a good parallel?
- [13:01]
B
It's not a bad comparison just in terms of the economic logic of it. I think what also has to be said is in the way that so much of our. I mean, obviously this is changing now, but so much of the infrastructure of our lives take fossil fuels for granted. It's sort of premised on the existence and the exploitation of fossil fuels. The same was true with slavery in the early modern era. I mean, it was kind of 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 kind of special. And I think the thing that, I mean, 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 are not enough to make that transition. That it needed to feel useful and beneficial to really important people for that change to take place. It wasn't enough to say, in the same way it's not enough to say, oh, fossil fuels, the exploitation of them is bad for the climate, it's bad for geopolitics, bad for a lot of things, that there needed to be other reasons for that change. But, yeah, it's not a bad comparison, actually.
- [14:34]
A
Yeah. Okay. I think we should start out. I mean, lots of people, I guess, including me, have the intuition that surely slavery would have gotten rid of it 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. So probably we should spend quite a bit of the conversation just getting out the basic facts here, because I think many people, including me, well, I'm not super familiar with them now, and I was extremely unfamiliar with them before this recent conversation this year. So maybe let's. Yeah, 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 of the times before that. What is the history of slavery in general? I guess you were saying? It's extremely common. Can you flesh that out a bit more?
- [15:22]
B
Oh, my goodness. Well, I mean, anybody who's studied the classics knows that slaveholding was essential in classical Greece, the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. You know, there was significant trafficking in men, women and children across the Sahara from really earliest recorded history down to the 19th, early 20th century. Vikings made their names as Vikings by slave raids all around the North Sea and the Mediterranean. I mean, you know, 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. I mean, one colleague, I have made the argument something like 2/3 to 3/4 of the migrants to the Americas down to the 1800 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 are far more African migrants to the western hemisphere than there were European migrants.
- [17:04]
A
What about the rest of the world? And other times, like I said, if we look at the rest of Africa or India or China, was slavery ubiquitous through all of these places?
- [17:15]
B
Yes. Although what starts to become difficult is there are so many different forms of coercion, dependency on freedom. And we use the term slavery to capture what is in fact a great variety of practices. One challenge, for example, that modern audiences sometimes have, is the idea that slaves were used to generate wealth as forced laborers. Many societies, and this is especially true in the Middle east, in much of Islamic civilization, in large parts of South Asia, in parts of medieval, early modern East Asia, comes Korea, China. Slaves were used for things that were employed in ways that were sometimes for sex, sometimes as, you know, the coerced, loyal servants to the head of state. Sort of. The practices of slavery are so varied. What happens in the Americas is one really important iteration. And if we're looking for sort of common features, in some ways it's the social and legal fact of being possessed by another person and utilized as if you are a thing, which is to say, as if you have no will of your own. And it's obviously a fiction because people do have wills of their own, regardless of how, you know, subjugated they are. But what slavery in some ways attempts to achieve is a dehumanization of the human. And so when scholars look to try to identify slavery in other times, in other places, often what they're battening on is or focusing on is the is that. Is that set of practices? But. Yeah, but it's not. It wasn't invented in colonial America by any means.
- [19:24]
A
Yeah. What signs of anti slavery sentiment were there elsewhere or earlier in history, but before kind of the 17th century, which is maybe where we'll start the current story.
- [19:36]
B
Yeah, so 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. And in the civilizations where we have records that allow us to explore those tensions, those views. It's a kind of a familiar way of thinking about this subject is where you see defenses of slavery. There must also have been questions and attacks on it. And you know, in, in Greek times, in Roman times, there are all kinds of ways that slavery is justified. Sometimes the idea that enslaved person is naturally a slave. That of course, was Aristotle's way of looking at the subject. Very famously, some Emphasize that'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 regards slavery as against natural law, as a violation of natural law, but instead as a creature of the laws of nations that comes conventional in human civilizations, even though it's not part of the natural order of things. You know, then the other thing that happens is that. And this is actually really important for this subject, is that slavery is a state that. Because it's regarded as a kind of a misfortune, rather than 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 an identity, collective identities begin to establish around who should be enslaved and who should not be enslaved. 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.
- [22:08]
A
So it attracts kind of a religious defense. So that's one way that people tried to explain it.
- [22:13]
B
It begins in the Middle Ages to acquire a kind of a religious framework where it's those who are of a different confessional world are those who should be enslaved.
- [22:27]
A
So it sounds like throughout history, people came up with various different explanations for how it is that enslavement could be justified, which I guess you're 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 sort of collective discomfort that people didn't feel like this was necessarily right, and so they had to rationalize it some way or another. Yeah, but were there any kind of. Was there any organized movement? Did people ever get together and say, no, actually, we think this is bad and we should get rid of it?
- [22:58]
B
Right. Well, I mean, the first thing to say, and this is, it's very easy to miss this, but it's fundamental. Enslaved men and women did whatever they could to get out of the status of being slaves. And they did that individually, they did it collectively. And so I want to be clear that in talking about antislavery today, you and I are talking about. What we'll mostly be talking about is the efforts by people who are neither slaveholders nor slaves to challenge that system. You know, it's quite correct to see Slave rebellions, uprisings as a manifestation of an anti slavery mindset. So I want to be really clear about that from a collective point of view. No, I mean, there are not movements as such that are aimed at the abolition of slavery itself. Now, there are some, you know, 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, in Peru and South America, in the Caribbean has legit, has legal and moral legitimacy, you know, and famously, the friar Bartolome de las Casas, you know, 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 kind of antislavery looks like really prior to the 18th century, which is specific challenges to specific practices among specific people in particular 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.
- [25:04]
A
Just to deal with the slave rebellion issue, as I understand that there were slave revolts, people attempting to escape enslavement throughout history, but like, none of them was really enduringly successful until the revolution in Haiti in 1791, if I remember. Why is it that all of these attempts by enslaved people to overturn slavery, at least in their case, that they never really presented an enduring or really functional challenge to slavery as an institution?
- [25:37]
B
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 a kind of a standard by which all other rebellions against slavery in the Americas any way 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. You know, one thing to think about is, you know, enslaved men and women were often very successful in freeing themselves individually and sometimes collectively, by running away, by escaping, sometimes by, you know, murdering the families that held them, by establishing redoubts in the back country, in the hinterlands and maroon communities where they could establish their own freedom. You know, 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 cross the 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 to ask the question of why not more rebellions, in some ways, I think really can be turned around. Sort of like it's extraordinary that there were any at all. And it really speaks to that commitment, 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.
- [27:51]
A
Something that was surprising to me, learning more about the history of slavery was that very often enslaved people, when they achieved their freedom, either through revolt or, I guess, manusmission, they would be very against slavery in their case, but they wouldn't necessarily then form the view that slavery as an institution ought to be abolished because it's just a horrific institution in general. Have I understood that correctly?
- [28:17]
B
And yeah, I wouldn't quite put it that way. I mean, I think the legitimacy of the system for those who were enslaved was always in question. And for the fact of the matter is that not only did they regard their own enslavement as illegitimate, but they regarded the enslavement of people like them as illegitimate. I mean, the critique of human bondage from those who were bound, we don't have their words in most instances, but we do have their actions. And those who were free, who became free or freed themselves, were manumitted or escaped in many instances, Their freedom was fragile. And this is why race was so important. You could mark out those who had been slaves by the color of their skin.
- [29:10]
A
And so they were always under threat.
- [29:11]
B
So they were always under threat. And the danger of being re enslaved was always there, I think. 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 confidence that an individual person. I mean, 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. Right? You could get a thousand. It's tried on January 6th. You could get thousands of people together. Right. The forces of order in any society are so much more powerful than its challengers. And 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.
- [30:30]
A
Yeah, yeah, I think I was. Mostly I've listened to history lectures from ancient Roman, ancient Greece where there's many more cases, I think, of slaves being freed. And it's got to be in that context where it's a little bit surprising that even when they became writers and intellectuals and politicians and so on, to a modern sensibility, it's shocking that they weren't then campaigners against slavery. But I suppose it's possible we've lost their words. 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.
- [31:05]
B
Yes. And I think in places where the enslavement seemed like a consequence of misfortune, captivity, you know, being conquered in war, somebody who had been captured in war, you know, 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 slave. I mean, the famous case of this is a west African case of princes from, you know, what's present day Nigeria who were slave traders, son of prominent slave traders, who themselves were taken captives, 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. Right. And you would think that somebody who had seen it, who 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. Right. I mean, 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.
- [32:38]
A
Let's turn now to, I guess the British empire in the 17th century. Yeah. 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?
- [32:51]
B
Yeah. I mean, you can find individuals in most of the colonies in what becomes. Think about New York and Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New England, where there are kind of isolated statements that have been 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. And 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 really, in some ways, many of us who write on this subject find the seeds of the movement, although I'm hesitant about that metaphor. The seeds of the movement in Quakers, in the Society of Friends.
- [34:01]
A
Yeah. 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 I guess 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's least likely to happen if we were to change history a bit differently.
- [34:26]
B
It's a great way of putting it.
- [34:28]
A
And I guess so here we're talking about kind of 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. And then I suppose the next filter is that they need to actually recruit other people and start organizing and become a meaningful advocacy group within society. Do you have any idea how important as a filter was this kind of stage that you first had some, you know, people who are 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?
- [35:02]
B
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, that the wealth that slavery enables contradicts our witness on behalf of simplicity, that the pride that 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 witness expressed 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. Like, that's not orthodox. That's not, you know, those are not our beliefs. You know, 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, a ritual, rather than being really deeply believed in. And 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? And 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 a agreement within the Society of Friends about what their values are, about what membership of the Society of Friends requires. And so it's very much about establishing a group identity, reinforcing a group identity around the fact that as Quakers, we find slave holding violates our consciences. And 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 that 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. And so in the same way that Quakers develop a sense of we do not serve in war. Right. We also, increasingly they take the view that to be Quaker means not to be a slaveholder, not to be a slave trader. But there is tiny fraction of the colonial population. And so the interesting question you think about filters is how does that internal witness, that collective identity, then get turned outward and directed outward to the broader society? And it's at that moment when that happens that you that there develops a sort of a broader anti slavery movement in the British and American world.
- [39:10]
A
Yeah. So I guess one theory for why it is that abolitionism took off in this place at this time, or began to gain momentum where it hadn't really anywhere else at any other time in Any other place before might be that. Well, the Quakers were just an extremely unusual religious group and they provided this small safe environment in which these ideas and I guess particular motivations in terms of identifying, like self identifying as a particular group who had their practices, their particular spiritual practices that defined them in distinction with the rest of society, that that provided a place where this could get going, where that hadn't existed before. I guess the Quakers are, they're definitely an unusual religious denomination in a global historical sense that 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?
- [40:07]
B
No, not alone, but they are really distinctive. I mean, 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 traveling preachers. If you think about the 17th and 18th century world, this was highly unusual. I mean they really believed in a kind of equality across sects 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 it really, really, really unusual in that regard. I think what kind of matters in a way is Quakers established really strong communities in places where slavery was present, but it wasn't absolutely fundamental to the social order. 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 like 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. And so what that means the Quakers were in a world where slavery existed, but the entire order wasn't dependent on it. And so you combine their really unusual sort of social practices, their unusual religious beliefs, their really unusual pacifism and in a place where slavery is present. And 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 and it's a set of features that make it possible to question it without risking a kind of a total overthrow of the socioeconomic order. And one way we can kind of see the importance of that is Quakers who were in Barbados never become significant abolitionists.
- [42:41]
A
And Barbados is one of the main.
- [42:42]
B
Slave colonies, one of the main slaveholders, really the first one in the English, you know, in the English empire, the first major sugar colony. And there were a lot of Quakers in Barbados as of the late 17th century. And there were some dissenters there on slave holding, but they were quickly shut down and a dissenting tradition never really develops there. So, you know, it's never just one variable. I mean, there are things that 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.
- [43:27]
A
That's really interesting. So 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 colonized. And that meant that in one of these colonies, in one of these cities, you might get the right mix that would allow people, I guess you're saying what you needed was for slavery to be present so that people could see it and object to it. An especially 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.
- [44:12]
B
Yes, that's right. That's right. And it's the reason why in a North American context, it's Massachusetts, it's Pennsylvania, where anti slavery organizing, and New York, to a degree, where anti slavery organizing really becomes where it coheres for the first time in the 1770s and the 1780s.
- [44:37]
A
Yeah. One way to try to answer this question or get some insight in this question of whether it's the Quakers that are a really important contributing factor is to ask whether we see incipient anti slavery movements among other religious denominations. Like was there a meaningful Catholic, Roman Catholic anti slavery, or Eastern Orthodox or Muslim anti slavery movements. And I guess if we don't see that, but we do see it quite a lot among the Quakers that we might think, well, society Friends, they were, they were a massive factor. Whereas if we see signs of the same ideas cropping up elsewhere, then we might think, well, it might have happened just in one of them eventually, sooner or later, yeah. Do you know much about the history of other groups elsewhere?
- [45:18]
B
Yeah, I mean, 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 concern 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. And 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 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. And 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, might have become, you know, it might become a different route to the future that we know. You know, the story of the Catholic Church is really interesting because in the places where, especially in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, manumission was far more common. And there were, you know, many more directives from the church about what it meant to be a Christian master, which meant a certain kind of practices of. 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 is 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 it was in a very broad sense, to try to encourage a kind of almost peace between masters and slaves so that the state of violence which is natural to slavery was instead sort of emphasized a degree of reciprocity. That's the ideology. It didn't actually work out that way. But the Catholic Church didn't question, didn't. There wasn't much challenges to the system as attempts to make slaveholders better people, if I could put it in the most crude possible sense.
- [47:51]
A
Was that the focus, the saving the souls of the slaveholders because they might be harmed?
- [47:58]
B
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 the Presbyterians in North America really were not much concerned with that 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 middle 18th century. 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. And especially in parts of West Africa, the Senegal River Valley, the Upper Gambia, 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 are operating along the coasts. So we're learning more about what antislavery looked like in other places. But I would just emphasize in that particular instance that it is a antislavery that's about protecting the freedom of members of the faith rather than the notion of that slavery in and of itself needs to be overthrown.
- [49:45]
A
Yeah, that. That does seem a little bit different. So. 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.
- [49:55]
B
Yeah.
- [49:55]
A
Was that the main objection?
- [49:56]
B
But yeah.
- [49:56]
A
I mean, did they also object to enslavement of Muslims by other Muslims? Because, as I understand.
- [50:03]
B
Yeah, well, you're not. I mean, under. I mean, this gets into a very complicated subject that we can only be very brief about, I guess. But under Islamic law, under all sort of systems of Islamic law, Muslims are not supposed to enslave other Muslims. Some Muslim powers, especially in the southern. In the Sudan, in 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 it could be taken as slaves because they weren't true Muslims. Right. And so what does it mean to be Islamic? And sort of. How do you measure that? If they're not fully recognizable, then, you know, maybe they're. 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 the similar religious world.
- [51:21]
A
Just quickly coming back to the Catholic Church. So it sounds like they also saw that there was something that they were struggling to reconcile their theology with the practice of slavery. But I guess 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 make it. Yeah, I suppose then you could still say, well, these people can still be saved. They can still be converted in time, and they're just kind of slaves in the meantime, as a personal misfortune. Am I understanding that right?
- [51:56]
B
Yeah. I mean, this is where the historians push for specificity and complexity, makes generalizations 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 baptized 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 that the property relationship still held, the dependents still held, the exploitation of labor still held, the control of the body still held. But the church operated in many instances, as a kind of not quite 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, you know, I say that, and then it's important to understand that the Jesuits were the largest corporate slaveholders in the Americas throughout the, you know, the early modern period. So it's a very complex picture.
- [54:09]
A
Yeah. I want to ask more questions about religion, but we should probably think about other things as well.
- [54:15]
B
Sure.
- [54:15]
A
I guess just coming back to the topic of how you got these, like, 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 places like regions like that elsewhere in the world throughout history.
- [54:33]
B
Yeah, absolutely. No, I mean, it's not even close to being decisive. It's the places where slavery, I mean, 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. And the notion is that there are slave societies are those worlds in which slavery becomes fundamental, defining foundation of that society. And you know, 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, not questioned. But its importance to the operation, to the social and economic world is not nearly to the same degree. And on the side of, at the end of this history that we're talking about, it's societies with slaves that 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.
- [56:29]
A
Let's come 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 as part, like 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 behavior for a member of our congregation and, 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. And I guess you're also saying that having established this norm internally, then they make the decision, I guess, to turn outwards and start advocating for this to other groups rather than just keeping it as something that only concerns them.
- [57:09]
B
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 take, to put it crudely, the view of, well, I get your point, but we're not going to do that. You know, that's. 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 are you know, 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, and they're slow to accept that. The story in England is really interesting because obviously Society of Friends, the, you know, 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 and 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 side. There's hardly any slaveholding in England. So it's very easy to favor 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 not 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 gonna 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 it 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 is going to study, sends all over the North American colonies, all over England. And in some ways what he writes becomes the template for the vast majority of antislavery publications that appear for a two decade period. I mean he really is that influential. And one of the things that he does is essentially tries to, he takes the Quaker witness and projects it outwards and says that for reasons that we can talk about, anti slavery is not just for Quakers, that the moral and religious witness should apply to the broader society as a whole.
- [60:52]
A
So here we have another filter where I guess this movement could have stagnated or died out. And 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 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. 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 economy.
- [61:23]
B
Exactly.
- [61:25]
A
And so, yeah, how is it that these barriers that I guess 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?
- [61:40]
B
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 parliamentary from 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, in fact, of saying right, British rights, which means Parliament is sovereign, subject to the. Yeah, so if you want British rights, this is exactly what you've got. Parliament sets the. You know, governs is sovereign, not only in Britain, but in the Empire.
- [62:51]
A
One thing that might be worth adding is that. Yeah, I think in this era, this idea of, like, of the rights of an Englishman was gaining greater and greater currency. I suppose as Britain itself was becoming more of a constitutional monarchy, Parliament was gaining more sovereignty. And I suppose so within England, this idea of the rights of an Englishman legally would have passed muster potentially. But in the colonies it was more problematic.
- [63:17]
B
Yeah, I mean, freedom in a. To put it very crudely, in an 18th century political sense, the Constitution is about the conjoined sovereignty of king in 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. And 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 favor on the other side of the Atlantic. And there are Quaker entrepreneurs and Anthony Benezett 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? Right. So it's a kind of opportunism by Quakers who see in the political controversies that lead to the American Revolution an opportunity to take an issue that they have been discussing among themselves and find a wider audience for it.
- [65:19]
A
Yeah.
- [65:19]
B
Now, there are other things that are going on, too. I mean, there's also a real change in the third quarter of the 18th century around notions of the kind of a revived notion that slavery is unnatural. It is only conventional, it is only convenient, it's only expedient. Montesquieu's spirit of the law, as I've come to realize, is just so crucial for a lot of antislavery thought in the third quarter of the 18th century. That's not Quaker. That really challenges basically the legal foundations of slavery, narrows the grounds to one of, basically, let's just admit it, we hold slaves because it helps us wealthy, and it's good for everybody but the slaves. And so there's 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.
- [66:30]
A
So I guess here we have another possible explanation for what was distinctive about this time and place. One is that political philosophers, this whole society, had been kind of incubating this idea of. 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. And then I guess you also happen to have this fortunate political situation where the American colonists really wanted to talk about natural rights and embrace natural rights, perhaps not realizing that the logical conclusion would be that a huge part of their social order ought to be overturned on. 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?
- [67:27]
B
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 and had not been thought to be extended by European thinkers 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, you know, of what the ancestors bequeathed to us or my rights as a member of the. As a subject of the King of Congo. Any number of reasons. Right. So natural rights as an ideology was there. You're right, it was kind of on the shelf in this sense. And it's because natural rights does not lead naturally into anti slavery thought and action that I'm skeptical of notions that in the end, at some point, some way, natural rights would have led to anti slavery 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 medieval legal thought regarded slavery as against nature, as against man's nature. So, you know, 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 natural rights or the idea of natural rights or natural rights ideology as the new ways to which those ideas are being mobilized in this period. That's really crucial for our subject.
- [70:00]
A
Yeah, Just as an aside, a thread through some of your work is 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 that 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 he was saying natural rights, people could have thought about that many centuries earlier. And yet for some reason it only took off as a notion applied to an enslaved people at this Time. Do you want to give any. To make this clear? Do you want to give any examples from kind of the present day of somewhat analogous cases?
- [70:49]
B
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 kind of 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, you know, going to sort of to push the next level of equality. And I've always thought that there can be too easy a linkage between, well, 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, I walked by homeless people on the street. It's cold, 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. And I really. I think that is something that in the writing about, 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 realized the humanity of Africans, once they understood the cruelty of slavery, then of course, they would organize and do something about it. And not only did it not happen that way, but it almost never happens that way. And so when the other thing happens, when there is 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.
- [73:47]
A
Yeah, I guess it's not pleasant, I guess, to defend anyone not dedicating their lives to making these changes. But 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 sort survive themselves. They only have so much slack capacity that we almost have to tune out most of the terrible things in the world or it will just be completely unmanageable. And 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. And so most stuff just most of the time is mostly getting neglected. And so just for that kind of base rate reason alone, it is kind of is the exceptional case where you get some massive moral and public policy revolution.
- [74:38]
B
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 that I often use in class from our own time, which I think crystallizes 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, vegans even, who some for health reasons, but some because they really don't like the thought of eating animals unnecessarily. Right? 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 anyways. Is it because I'm not alert? Is it because I'm. 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, 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.
- [76:35]
A
And that's how humans are to some extent now and now and in the past. Okay, 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. And I guess you're Saying Benezet was a particularly important character.
- [76:52]
B
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 recognize 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, other places. But there's a kind of a way that it becomes this 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, say, listen, you guys aren't. 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. It's very much in the way that British writers and politicians think about it. It's very much of an American practice. So what begins to happen, 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 independence, 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 a 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, criticize your political opponents. Exactly, exactly.
- [80:30]
A
That's very interesting. So I guess the issue gets polarized, but polarized 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 thing that's for this atrocity, basically.
- [80:48]
B
Exactly.
- [80:49]
A
In so doing, reinforcing the idea that it's wrong. And there's one reason that you think that this wasn't inevitable is that this does just seem like a slightly happy coincidence.
- [81:01]
B
It had never been done before. The institution of slavery had never been used this way before. It had never become a kind of an 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 propagandists 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. Right. And so by redescribing slavery as the fault of particular groups, that this is something that is blameworthy. Right. It opens up the possibility. It does two things. First of all, it establishes the fact that actually it's not just the way the world works, that there are actually people, 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. Right. And so a kind of a politics of antislavery emerges out of this contratempts 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 anti slavery at all. 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.
- [82:58]
A
So they weren't actually against it per se, or they didn't have some deep moral conviction?
- [83:02]
B
No.
- [83:02]
A
Again, they were just throwing mud. Is that it?
- [83:03]
B
No, absolutely no. This has had nothing to do with being in favor of emancipation or abolition or being concerned about black people or any of those things. What it was about was trying to reveal using slavery as a way of revealing a character flaw in your political opponents. That's how it begins.
- [83:26]
A
But I guess 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 that actually interpreting them naturally and correctly.
- [83:39]
B
Well, so 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 sort of like, why do we justify this? What are the grounds for it? Maybe this. There's a kind of a secondary set of discussions that take place that are specifically about slavery that are enabled. Inspired by these political arguments. So, you know, scholars have long understood that it's in the 1770s that there's a kind of anti slavery discourse that's emerging. And it's emerging at this moment precisely because of these. 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.
- [84:32]
A
Gravity.
- [84:33]
B
Thank you. Of depravity. Yes. To oppose it is to say something about your virtue. Right. And so what starts to happen is a kind of a positioning of. Especially first on the American side, when we declare independence, we are also going to be setting slavery on course for extinction. They either don't mean it or don't realize 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, at least on the British side, 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.
- [85:27]
A
I see what they mean, that Britain is different because we don't have slavery within. I see. So we're not like these. We're not like those awful country folk from the.
- [85:39]
B
Exactly. Exactly.
- [85:42]
A
I guess, yeah. When I was prepping for the interview, one thing that seemed distinctive about the setup here that could have contributed is that you've got the imperial center in England and Scotland and Wales and I guess Ireland to some extent, where slavery is not permitted. And I think there would have been mass opposition to the introduction of slavery. Not so sure.
- [86:06]
B
Well, it's not so much that it's not permitted, it's that it's actually. Okay, it's actually literally not permitted in this sense. It's not outlawed. It's just that it's not lawful either. And 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. Right. And so the status is legal cases. Right, Right. So this is the importance of. 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, new focus on it among scholars. And it really is an important moment because it's a decision that essentially involves the question of whether what powers do slaveholders in England have over their slaves in a society where there's no slave law? And the judgment 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 an enslaved man and woman 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. And so it's a judgment that was taken as a sign that English common law did not recognize slavery and would not enforce the rights of slaveholders. And this happened just in the moment where the existence pervasiveness of slaveholding in North America had become really important. So. Yeah, so you've got. But in Scotland and England and Ireland, a world in which slaveholding in Wales is not. There are no slave laws, there's no fugitive slave laws. Then on the other side of the Atlantic, slavery is literally everywhere. And so 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.
- [88:39]
A
I see. So, yes. So did that facilitate the growth of this attitude, I guess, that you had this imperial center that didn't. 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 criticize them, it's so natural for them to reach us. Like, we would never allow this kind of trip. It's abhorrent and so it can gain momentum.
- [89:03]
B
But it's very easy to oppose something that doesn't involve you.
- [89:06]
A
Yeah.
- [89:08]
B
Or anybody that you know. Right.
- [89:12]
A
Yeah. And that's why, I guess, it's an auspicious setup for the movement because it can potentially get all these people and also. And not just any people, but the people at the center of political power within this empire.
- [89:21]
B
Exactly.
- [89:22]
A
So convenient.
- [89:23]
B
Exactly.
- [89:24]
A
I guess another explanation that can speak to the inevitability or contingency of it is 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 who manage, occasionally a single person who really managed to bring an issue into the limelight where otherwise it might have languished for a while. Do you think that there are kind of candidates for that in this time?
- [89:55]
B
Yeah. I spent more time than I'd care to admit thinking about this subject. And 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. And they kind of stood in this special place of having revealed and then mobilized and then led, and then persisted in seeing the cause brought to its successful conclusion. And so when I first started working on this subject many, many years ago, I was determined not to tell that story. And not only because it's a kind of 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. And if you think about the way people talk about movements today, there's a real tension between 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 that all of the men and women, and especially women who do all this hidden work to make a movement go? And what happens when we focus on leaders and don't pay attention to everyone else who is pushing a cause? So all of these things make writing about the beginning of a movement very complicated. And there are a number of scholars who did this before I started to work on the subject, who really emphasized the popular dimensions of anti slavery, that it was a kind of a public will, it was a kind of upswell of opinion that the leaders were in some ways just kind of 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. This is a long answer to the question, Rob, because I really keep saying this is the crux of the matter. That's the crux of the matter. But I do 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 a kind of 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. And so 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. And so 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, less known but really important figures like James Ramsey 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. 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 informs the choices they make around slavery. So there's a way that my thinking about this increasingly migrates towards the biographical, but not with the intention of celebrating heroes, but trying to almost diagnose the peculiar features of personalities who do peculiar things.
- [96:12]
A
So it sounds like you're leaning towards the view that there were individuals who mattered, that if, I guess, as 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, but before they took action, there were far few people involved. Afterwards, there's tons the other perspective of people, there were broad social trends, and if it hadn't been then someone else would have filled that niche within society, that they would have been the person who spoke up instead. How can one tell?
- [96:52]
B
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 use the cliche to 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. But I do think, 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.
- [97:47]
A
I see. Yeah. So I guess who does seem most decisive as an individual, if anyone? And why would you think of them as being particularly important?
- [98:01]
B
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. And 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. So 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 Ramsey that shaped the debate in ways that are lasting. But as far as the movement goes, I just think that Thomas Clarkson's really essential to how it ends up, to what ends up emerging.
- [99:46]
A
Sounds like 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.
- [100:14]
B
People for so long, it's very hard to document. But in the immediate aftermath of American, 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. And there is a sense that the loss of North America says that in one way or another, as the pollsters say today, the empire was on the wrong track. Right. That there was just a kind of a. It was a indication that there were 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, you know, to pose questions that had not really been posed before.
- [101:34]
A
Let's talk about the later stages of the antislavery movement now, I guess to give people some signposts, you were saying that, that there was this process, I guess from 1780 through to 1806, where the issue was abolishing or there was this growing public policy like movement towards abolishing the Atlantic slave trade. And then it was 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.
- [102:07]
B
There is, there's 50 years between the beginning of the anti slavery movement and the ban on slaveholding in the British Empire. 50 years is a long time. I mean, think about 50 years from now. Right. That's more than a lifetime for most of the folks who were involved.
- [102:32]
A
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?
- [102:51]
B
Yeah. The pro slavery 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. It's the kind of the. Feels very modern somehow, 19th century version of industries writing the rules that will govern their, their operations. There are some things that they had to give in on. But yeah, as political actors, they were exceptionally, exceptionally skillful. 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 sort of ways that the whole idea of owning another person at any time, period, is hard to sit with. But from a legal point of view, from the standpoint of slaveholders, that's real money that was walking around. It's been a lot. There's a lot of capital tined up in the people that they owned. And I've said this sometimes in class, not only to, often to sort of grimaces from students, but emancipation to slaveholders is confiscation. It's taking other people's stuff. Right. And so there's a more general question about, but 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? Right. So there's a kind of a 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, you know, large, you know, inventories of human beings?
- [105:21]
A
I guess they wouldn't have called it class consciousness then, but it sounds like there was maybe among elites who had lots of wealth, seeing other elites being losing it all might have made them nervous.
- [105:32]
B
And this is why when emancipation does come in 1833, it's with the 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 recognized and paid for.
- [106:08]
A
So you've just been laying out all of these reasons why it was extremely. It sounds like they were really up against an extremely difficult task here, trying to, like, even at this late stage, even after there was 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?
- [106:34]
B
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 favor of slave trade abolition. And they are for moral reasons or 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, 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, the politicians who had protected the slaveholders for a quarter century. So again, the Reform act of 1832, its purpose was not to promote, enable emancipation, but that new Parliament was far more open to the lobbying of abolitionists than earlier Parliaments had been. So one thing that's true is that from 1787 down to 1838, for nearly 50 years, there is an anti slavery 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. But 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 factors. Actions 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.
- [109:13]
A
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. I guess that makes it seem feel less contingent at this point because the sense is that, well, they're just going to keep trying until that the stars happen to align and they're able to get their way.
- [109:33]
B
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 says something good about you as a nation. And for most of the folks who take anti slavery positions, it's deeply held, but it's also in some ways costless, right? I mean, the barriers to entry are incredibly low. Right. Because all of the impact, most of the impact, the impact that people think about is all overseas. So I often think about. There's a lot of literature, especially in the 1980s, 1990s, that really emphasized just how all the petitioning. There's just hundreds of thousands of people signing anti slavery 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 anti slavery petition saying, are you for slavery or are you against it? Well, yeah, I'll sign. I'm against it. That's easy, right? It kind of takes on that. It takes on that character in England. It takes on that character of a moral stand.
- [111:37]
A
Every right person is against us.
- [111:39]
B
A moral stand that you can take that says 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.
- [111:58]
A
Another factor that can make it in as much 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 happened before, continued after, it happened in many other countries as well, this kind of incremental increase in the franchise. Do you think that is one plausible mechanism by which as countries became more democratic or as power was distributed somewhat more broadly, I guess potentially as a result of the Industrial Revolution, maybe a contributing factor, would that have helped to undermine support for slavery more generally?
- [112:42]
B
Yeah, I think so. In Western Europe, I think that's true. You know, the ultimate abolition of slavery in the British Empire is tied up, you know, in the revolutions of you know, 1830 and 1848. I guess 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. And so. So I do think that it becomes a kind of a perennial, especially in Britain and the United States, that 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 unlikely. Most unlikely was the development of a movement in the first place. Once there is a movement, the chances of it concluding, 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 it has to be contested. 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. Right. 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. So it's this moment of transition in the last quarter of the 18th century that I think is the real pivot, point, turning point.
- [115:15]
A
I see. Yeah. That once it's a constant political issue, it's likely that eventually it will be undermined. But it had to be something. Yeah, sorry.
- [115:24]
B
Far more likely, in any case.
- [115:26]
A
Yeah. At least much more likely. So one whole theory that people might be listeners, might be familiar with, that we haven't really talked about yet, is people have this economic theory, I guess, of why it is that the abolition of slavery was going to happen sooner or later. And it's, I guess, 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. Do you want to, I guess, first explain what those explain better than me what they say?
- [116:04]
B
Yeah. So this is the myth of inevitable human progress, and it takes a variety of forms. One is the sort of the Enlightenment naturally leads led to enlightened moral outlooks or that economic development. Its very logic would lead to the overthrow of slavery. And these are the kinds of subjects that historians earn their money debating with other historians. And 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 book Capitalism and Slavery, which was published in 1944. And he describes both abolition and emancipation as driven by the logic of economic change and that abolitionists had, in many instances, economic motivations. And 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, of British values and British commitments to liberty and law and civilization. That there was a kind of incipient abolitionism in British culture. And 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 need to get into all of that. But those outside of Britain had 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 those kinds of things. So Eric Williams was drawing on that tradition. And it's an argument that after 1944 was largely ignored for many years and then contested, challenged intensively in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s by historians, especially economic historians, who, as we say today, ran the numbers and challenged the empirical basis for Williams 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 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 a mercy killing of a dying economy. Me, most folks who, not all, but many economic historians who've really sort of 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. And 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. So 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.
- [120:48]
A
I see. So 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. And so that was what drove people to give up on it. And basically, I guess, you think that when you run the numbers, or other people who've run the numbers, it just seems like that that's not the case at all, that it was very profitable, 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. On and on.
- [121:22]
B
Yeah. I mean, the military part of it I'm less sure about. But this is where one of the real challenges for this kind of subject, Rob, is 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, in 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 favor emancipation, but they were not as opposed to it as some others might be. Right. Because there were some colonies, Barbados is a very good example, that had declined in profitability, that were not as, especially after slave trade. Abolition, where slavery was, have been really weakened. And there are very important strategic reasons, not necessarily economic ones, but strategic reasons why abolition made sense in 1807. And the proportion of the elite who are committed to slavery by the 1820s, early 1830s, is declining. And there is a growing belief that. That free labor 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 labor here, nothing is going to get done. And they turn 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. 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.
- [123:42]
A
Like that just doesn't happen, never happens. Which.
- [123:44]
B
Right. So the whole economically, like the people who are engaged stages of the business are quite sure it's economically profitable. So a bunch of folks who are 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 are actually invested in this is the reason why many of us take the art and that there's no reason, absent abolition, emancipation, that the institution could not have run into the early 20th century.
- [124:08]
A
So let's set that argument aside. It doesn't make a ton of sense to me. I'm kind of surprised that people took a. Took it seriously. Maybe there's arguments that we're missing here, but I guess 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 kind of in tandem and that. And if there wasn't any causal connection between them or they weren't both caused by some common thing, by some common factor, then it's just a hell of a coincidence. It makes you wonder.
- [124:53]
B
So I'm going to tell you right now that I don't think the last word has been written on this subject at all. And I think it's time for another generation of scholars to come back and re examine 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 the much more refined understanding that we have about the Industrial Revolution. So 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 center 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. And so there's a real kind of both 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. Purpose. There is no question about the synchronization 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 seems like.
- [126:21]
A
It was quite a gradual takeoff, in.
- [126:22]
B
A sense, the phases of its growth. Right. So the whole notion of a kind of spectacular takeoff, which was such an important part of the literature when Williams wrote, is no longer the, you know, the general understanding among scholars who work on the subject today.
- [126:38]
A
So that story you just mentioned there has slavery causing the Industrial Revolution, and then I suppose the progression.
- [126:45]
B
The Industrial Revolution turning around and causing the end of slavery. Yes.
- [126:49]
A
Something that's a little bit surprising about that is that, I mean, slavery can't be necessary. Sorry. Sufficient for the Industrial Revolution because slavery was in almost all times and all places throughout history. And yet it's only kind of there that we saw this particular style of Industrial Revolution. So I suppose that doesn't rule it. That doesn't rule it out being a necessary factor.
- [127:11]
B
But 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 connected, identified major bankers, major industrialists who also had major investments in the British West Indies, sometimes as plantation owners, sometimes as merchants dealing with the plantations. So he did what we think of today as kind of 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. And that work continues apace when people study the sort of. Who held slaves at the time of emancipation in 1833. The problem is that it's not easy to segregate capital flows from one. You know, there's no way you can say that slavery alone, obviously, for the reasons that you just described, was alone sufficient for an industrial revolution. There are many places where there are significant slave profits related to the slave economy that did not industrialize in the way that Britain did. And the Netherlands is the most famous, you know, important case for thinking about a kind of a. A counterexample. But in some ways it's not an argument that it's sufficient or even that it's necessary, but that this is what happened.
- [128:52]
A
That in this particular case, less counterfactual history and more description of the mechanism.
- [128:57]
B
But in this particular case, when you look at the beginning of a banking sector, of a private banking sector, essentially when you look at the development of insurance, when you look at the manufacturing economy, 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 in sort of the question of small ratios, of large ratios, how much. 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 the overseas economy, an overseas economy that was organized 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. There's no one single cause of the Industrial Revolution, of course. Yeah.
- [130:19]
A
The thing that's always seemed odd about that line of argument to me is that, I mean, 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. And 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.
- [130:50]
B
Yeah. And this is what economic historians get into, and 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 both industrialization. Because when you talk about industrialization, you're talking about capital investment, but you're also about increasing the scale of production. Right. And the question of scale of production is closely related to the size of the markets you have to sell in. And 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 sort of push those commodities, those manufactured goods, into other overseas markets. So, I mean, it's such a complicated question. I just, you know, it would. The truth lies somewhere between. The Industrial Revolution was completely independent of the overseas slaving economy, and it was entirely dependent on it.
- [132:15]
A
Yeah. Okay, let's talk about a different mechanism that would have had a degree of inevitability about it, which is that. So after, like, as the world has industrialized over the last 250 years, we see a kind of consistent shift in the values that people have. I suppose there's one particular framing of this from the World Values Survey, folks who. Have you seen this stuff before?
- [132:42]
B
No, I have.
- [132:44]
A
So 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. And 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. And it seems that there is this kind of 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 what changes about human behavior 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. So 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 I guess 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?
- [134:06]
B
Not at all.
- [134:07]
A
Wow. Okay, go for it.
- [134:13]
B
I think it's demonstrably untrue. And I also think, well, let me put it this way, it might be true in some instances, but it's certainly not. I would not describe it as some universal law of values in human civilization. I mean, look, I mean this is not my field or my subject, but as I understand it, wealth, art, creativity. Weimar, Germany. Yeah, I mean people had. There are all kinds of counterexamples. And 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 civilization, 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. Certainly there was no. And that was one of the largest slave holding society that had probably existed in the world at that point. So I just, just think that's hopeful. I think I'd go even further and say it's wishful thinking. Yeah, I don't think there is a real tie. And 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. And I just don't. I mean, I don't think that that's necessarily true. You know, we have enough in the last century and a half to know. I mean, I think the other thing you might think about is like sort of the age of high imperialism in Britain, France, Germany, late 19th, early 20th century, where extraordinary concentrations of wealth were dependent upon the oppression, colonialism throughout sub Saharan Africa, North Africa, South Asia, and I mean, the artistic production, the creativity of Belle Epoque France, Edwardian England. I mean, 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 just. I have a hard time accepting that as a linkage.
- [137:20]
A
Generalization. Yeah. Okay. So. Yeah, so I guess 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. So you might have thought, well, 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. And I guess as 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 realizing that colonialism was wrong, that wasn't the path that things took.
- [138:07]
B
If you wanted to run this argument, and it's not something that I really believe in, but if you wanted to run this argument, you would make a case that. That it's the middling classes, it's the bourgeoisie, it's where the energy for these kinds of movements emerge. I do think that there is a degree of class warfare is not quite the right word for it, but there is a fair amount of resentment of the kind of wealth and power that slaveholders enjoy because they own slaves. And 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. And I think it's a lot of the rank and file of abolitionist and then emancipationist convictions in Britain. So if you wanted to run an argument that really emphasized economic development, I think it's too crude and I think it only goes so far. But you could make an argument that the democratization 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 regime 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, I do think that if you want to think about long term economic development, that would be the place that I would look for.
- [140:10]
A
Okay, yeah, we'll stick up a link to this Englehart world civil 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 shift in attitudes, I guess, particularly from thinking that people should follow cultural norms towards thinking that individuals should maybe be more free to do what they want. Let me try, I'm representing here arguments that listeners have sent in. By the way, these are the things that apparently have jumped to people's minds when they've read what we owe the future. I guess look at it a different way. I think that one popular model of human moral psychology is called moral foundations theory. And 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, sometimes weaker. The most common list that psychologists offer is that there's like number one is harm care. So it's sort of a utilitarian, don't want to hurt other people thing. Then there's fairness, cheating, sort of reciprocity. You got liberty versus oppression, authority and subversion. Fifth one is kind of loyalty and betrayal. And the sixth one is sanctity degradation. So something about spirituality. Now ideally this is just intended to be kind of a neutrally descriptive, it's almost like a personality test of seeing, like how strongly do 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 somewhat less 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, 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 belief in authority and hierarchy. That kind of moral intuition that could ever really cause people to think that slavery could be acceptable. And so, yeah, if you did have this trend towards people placing greater weight on those moral intuitions, then perhaps that would have over time, time caused people to become less favorable towards slavery. Do you have any reactions to that?
- [142:30]
B
Certainly a feature of antislavery thought and a common element in antislavery argument, especially in England, is what you might identify what you've identified as the harm sort of axis. You know, there's a lot of propaganda anti slavery pamphlets that emphasize the cruelty, emphasize the barbarity, emphasize the physical violence, emphasize 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. And therefore that equality means that the treatment, the grounds on which people are treated, goes in some ways into the equality under law. Right. And those are elements that are in antislavery arguments. But I would go back to the question in my mind is that are they prior or are they posterior consequences of antislavery movements? Because these are not, as you say, these are in some ways are not new. The harm one is actually very interesting because in the 18th and early 19th century in Anglo American culture, there is a real turn against the most bloody of punishments, right? Capital punishment goes into behind closed doors, there's no more hanging trees, the whole sort of 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 long 19th century. And the turn against slavery is part of that. I agree with that. But I guess my question is.
- [144:49]
A
Is.
- [144:49]
B
The anti slavery movement the product of that or a cause of it? Right. 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, right? I mean, could be whipped 70, 80 times.
- [145:21]
A
Right?
- [145:21]
B
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. So the turn against whipping in the Navy is in part a consequence against the turn against whipping in slavery, Right? Right. So I think it can. So I am. It's not that the things that you're describing don't occur. It's that I think the causal sequence, we sometimes. I think the causal sequence is more complicated than that model would seem to suggest the whole idea of gender equality in the 19th century and women's rights comes directly out of the campaign against slavery. Right. And so there's a. So again, I think antislavery serves as a progenitor of new ideas of equality as much as it is a product of, of them. And it would be interesting to think about. And 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? And I would argue that it's actually that it's, that there's, I think there would have been a movement, there would have been a movement towards greater equality, but it was certainly galvanized and learned a lot of lessons from the anti slavery movement movement.
- [146:57]
A
So I guess, yeah, one model here, I guess 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.
- [147:07]
B
I do think that's part of the story.
- [147:09]
A
Yeah. And I guess the other one is saying that it's increasing education and wealth that are driving these things each in turn. Let's see. I guess actually another objection that I had to this, at least about the inevitability is that, that, and actually this is kind of consistent with the story where the slavery thing 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 slang back. You could have, I guess, as you're pointing out, it's like that the Nazis in a sense were very rich and they decided as they became more powerful, they didn't decide to use it for compassionate ends. And I suppose also you've got the ancient Romans 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 towards 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.
- [148:25]
B
Yeah, and I think 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 recognized as problems because they seem to be on dark capacity. I think those things are true, but I also think 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. And I'm thinking especially about what happens in the late 19th and early 20th century. The identity that Western Europe acquires as the part of the world that abolished slavery then becomes the alibi, maybe even the apology, for colonizing 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 sort of series of ways that slavery gets disguised in the 19th century, where the. 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 against guarding, both guarding against our worst instincts as individuals and as societies, and a certain amount of humility, to me, 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? And that's not to say that we should not be. I mean, obviously 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 things have, you know, where there is real progress, there is real change. One of the things I sometimes say in the class is that the fact of the matter is that on the subject of slavery, there is no question about human progress over the last 200 years. I mean, this is indisputable. There is no place on the planet right now where slavery is legal. Now, there are lots of places where slavery operates, but everybody who's doing it has to do it underground, right? 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.
- [152:43]
A
Yeah, this connects a lot with, I guess. Yeah, you wouldn't have heard this, of course, but we have a discussion at the start of my conversation with Bear Braumoller a couple of episodes back that listeners might be interested in going and checking out, if they haven't already, where we talk about the legacy of the Enlightenment and talk about what a mixed blessing it was or 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. And 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.
- [153:27]
B
We could play this with almost anything. And I think even posing the questions points out absurdity may be too strong, but rise of Christianity, good or bad? Columbus's crossing of the Atlantis, good or bad? Well, it kind of depends on who you ask and what you're interested in. Right. I mean, I don't think these things are resolvable in very simple moralistic terms of, you know, I mean, heck, you could have the same conversation with, you know, the Reformation, good or bad. My suspicion is that there are different answers to that, you know, 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, at least from a historian's point of view, to simplify things in the ways that those kinds of analyses require.
- [154:30]
A
Yeah, I think we actually slightly 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 know to what? It's a very difficult question. How would one tell how contingent an event like this is? One that occurred to me is that if we saw that on all conceptually related issues to abolitionism, we were also seeing, we were 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 this. 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, well, 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 is to what degree are we consistent in. 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?
- [155:47]
B
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.
- [156:17]
A
So could be hard to boil it down.
- [156:20]
B
There's a. 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? I mean, you can play this kind of game forever. On the other hand, you can do the thing of. Well, but look, the forces. 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 there's not anything, 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 you. It. I guess really the point I want to make is that in thinking about how we make sense of the past, it's perfectly possible to make it all about contingency or perfectly possible to make it all about this sort of evolutionary point of view. And in some ways it's a matter of perspective. It's a matter in some ways of taste and what you are interested in. I really believe, and I really think.
- [158:23]
A
That.
- [158:25]
B
Slavery is a institution as a set of practices so normal in human civilizations down to the 18th century that. That it took something special for it to become controversial and a target for intervention. And so I don't think that every movement is equally contingent. I mean, I would say, for example, that I think manufacturing, the sort of industrial development is more. Is less surprising retrospectively than the challenge to slavery and the end of slavery is, let's 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 anti slavery movement in the decades before. You might say 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 get into the contingencies of that, but I don't think. Well, 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's 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. This is the thing to be able to talk about the past intelligibly. We have to talk about it in terms that we can communicate, that you can be understood. We have to simplify things to be able to have a conversation. The past is just incredibly complex, like the present is incredibly complex. And our capacity to know about it is very fragmentary. And so really 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 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. I mean, a lot of things that were kind of true are just not true in the same way anymore anymore. And that may be true for lots of subjects 25 years from now. And so we're engaged in the exercise of just trying to understand the past better, not to have kind of 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.
- [161:45]
A
Yeah. So I've tried advancing some theories that abolitionism was less contingent. I guess 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 possible?
- [162:02]
B
Yeah, 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, when does it 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, but I could imagine a line of argument that said that anti slavery 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.
- [162:56]
A
It's a hard case to make.
- [162:58]
B
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 labor in the end would have become problematic in industrial economies.
- [163:20]
A
And I suppose maybe even more so in a knowledge economy or even more.
- [163:23]
B
So in knowledge economies.
- [163:24]
A
That'd be very hard to run McKinsey with coerced labor.
- [163:29]
B
Well, that's right. And also I think the other part that's actually even more interesting in some ways with the development of robotics. Right. So that some of the drudge labor, to the extent that it can be mechanized, 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. And many slaveholding societies have actually organized themselves around the possession of slaves as luxury items. The 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 it's not in most cultures. It's not terribly easy to document.
- [164:59]
A
The.
- [164:59]
B
Ways in which slavery has been used to acquire and incorporate young people who then can become loyal servants of the powerful. You know, think about the kinds of stories that we tell about 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 7 and 8 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. Right. Slavery is extraordinarily malleable as a set of practices and institutions. And even if it over time had become economically less useful, it would have.
- [165:57]
A
Been useful to the slave owners.
- [165:58]
B
It would have been useful to the slave owners. And just think about service. I mean knowledge Economy also goes with the growth of the service economy. And it's not hard to imagine service economy positions. Certainly they were in households. In households, in elite households, all the service in the American south, all service was done by slaves. True. In Brazilian households, bureaucrats. I mean, 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 even if it was economically likely to become less useful, in some ways, I think it's wishful thinking to believe that if it had been possible to exploit people in this way legally, then people would not have done so.
- [167:05]
A
Yeah, I'm with you on that.
- [167:06]
B
Yeah.
- [167:07]
A
I don't really understand the logic of this argument. I mean, especially when you realize how many very sophisticated. How much sophisticated knowledge work was done by. Through coerced labor throughout history. It doesn't make a ton of sense, I guess. 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?
- [167:30]
B
Such an interesting question, Rob. I mean, you and everyone else will have figured out what a skeptic 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 in that certain kinds of changes make other kinds of changes more likely. I do, for example, think that, as I said earlier, that the challenge to women's rights became far more likely on the heels of movements concerned with the rights of enslaved people. So I do think that you can also extend this to. You can actually see these chain reactions even more recently. Right. I mean, the civil rights movement in important ways in the United States anyway, in important ways made possible the gay rights movement. Could rights for gays and lesbians been possible absent the civil rights movement? Yeah, I'm sure. But was it more likely because of the model? Yeah. So the sequence kind of matters for these things. And it's not clear that you can segregate one off from the other. I mean, you might even say, 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 1500 years for that to get worked out. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I think you can, you can sort of play the, you can sort of, you know, 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 fillet out one issue as if it's not related to other issues. Yeah, right. You can't do the experiment of let's hold everything else constantly and just look.
- [170:21]
A
At this one between them. Yeah. That Christianity question was the one that I actually cut off a few hours ago. We were talking about that was saying, I mean some people have suggested that there was something about the moral message and the theology of Christianity that provided further kindling, I suppose, for people to oppose slavery maybe wasn't inevitable, but it made it easier for people to make the argument in Christian societies relatively to some, like to possibly other religions, both that exist now and ones that had existed before Christianity. Yeah. Do you place much weight on that line of argument?
- [170:57]
B
So listen, I mean, if I was in a, 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 favor. The problem is the empirical problem. You can talk about the logics or the implicit, the explicit values or the implicit or the ramifications of a certain orientation towards an understanding of humanity, an understanding of God, an understanding of the inheritance of the Old Testament, the 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 anti slavery 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, something.
- [172:17]
A
Inevitable that took an awful long time.
- [172:19]
B
So that the churches were major slave holding institutions that Christian theologians defended slavery repeatedly over a millennium and a half. So you know, I mean, it's just, it's, I mean, you know, and obviously there's a cause. They say, well, that wasn't, that wasn't the real thing. The real thing was just kind of waiting to come out. And it's like, well, sometimes the real.
- [172:47]
A
Thing doesn't necessarily mean.
- [172:49]
B
Well, it's just, you know, it's, it requires a great deal of selectivity.
- [172:54]
A
Yeah.
- [172:55]
B
Not just denial or evasion, but selectivity to find just in the same way it requires selectivity to say that Christianity is a religion of massacres, and all it does is Christians just go around massacring people, and that's what Christianity is. Well, I mean, if you're very selectively, you could go through and find that, but you'd have to leave a lot out. All right. Yeah.
- [173:25]
A
I think it's been a very intense three hours. I feel very lucky to have been able to talk about all of these things with you. But should I let you go and do some other work? It's a very grim topic. I feel like it'd be great to finish on a high note.
- [173:44]
B
I often tell my students that my job is to depress people and that I'm very well rewarded for always being the downer. I mean, look, I actually. 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. You know, I think we. We need to watch ourselves individually and watch our. The worlds that we live in and the people that we elect and think about what harms we do or what harms we authorize 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 if you take away the notion of inevitable cultural progress, then what you put in is the necessity of human action, individual and collectively, that the world gets, to put it crudely, better or worse on the choices we make individually and collectively, not because things are just trending in the right direction. So a sober look at that history, I think, 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. I mean, that's how we got to the extent that things are better now than they were before. That's how we got here. And so I think there's, if not a cause for hope, a cause for action, that comes out of this, comes out of thinking about these stories.
- [176:11]
A
My guest today has been Christopher Brown. Thanks so much for coming on the 80,000 Hours podcast, Christopher.
- [176:15]
B
Thank you, Rob.