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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And even more important, slaves are not doing work that white people
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.
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.
One of the main slave, 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 slaveholding, 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.
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.
Yeah.
Showing 241–260 of 1,098 · page 13 of 55
← Previous
Next →