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
You know, if there's one name to know from this history, it's Anthony Benezet, who 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 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 anti-slavery publications that appear for a two-decade period.
I mean, he really is that influential.
And one of the things that he does is he essentially takes the Quaker witness and projects it outwards and says that,
You know, for reasons that we can talk about, this is, you know, anti-slavery is not just for Quakers, that the moral and religious witness should apply to the broader society as a whole.
Exactly, exactly.
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 reform,
you know, from new initiatives from parliament, new laws, new rules, Stamp Act, Sugar Act, enforcement of cutting down on 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 is a way of, has the effect, in fact, of saying, right, British rights, which means parliament is sovereign.
Subject to the, yeah, I see.
So if you want British rights, that's exactly what you've got.
Parliament sets the, you know, governs, is sovereign, and not only in Britain, but in the empire.
Yeah, I mean, freedom in a, you know, to put it very crudely, in an 18th century political sense, the Constitution is about the conjoined sovereignty of king and 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,
Showing 361–380 of 1,098 · page 19 of 55
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