Christopher Brown
speaker
1,098 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 20 Jan
Christopher Brown’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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.
I ground that in the economic strength of
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 is 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.
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, you know, 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.
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, you know, 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.
You know, it's Tuesday, January 3rd, 1742, and we're on the beaches near Cape Coast Castle.
What's going on on that particular day?
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