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
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, you know, they torture each other, they behead each other, they, you know, massacre each other.
But the notion of slavery is not what you do to those who are of the similar, you know, religious world.
Yeah, I mean, this is where the historian's 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.
It 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 dependence 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 I say that, and then it's important to understand that the Jesuits were the largest corporate slaveholders in the Americas throughout the early modern period.
So it's a very complex picture.
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.
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