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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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
This goes back to an analysis that a great classicist named Moses Finley wrote.
suggested more than six decades ago and has been used by historians of slavery in different ways ever since.
And the notion is that slave societies are those worlds in which slavery becomes a fundamental defining foundation.
of that society.
And the classical cases being classical Rome, the Caribbean, Brazil, the southern United States, where the whole social, economic, and political order of the cultural world is shaped by slavery.
In societies with slaves, by contrast, are those places where slavery exists.
It's legal.
It is not necessarily questioned, not questioned, but it's important to the operation of
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.
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.
So if you all decide that you want to make that a term of your witness, that's fine.
But where we are, there are many of us who value the ability to own slaves.
Showing 321–340 of 1,098 · page 17 of 55
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