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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #145 Classic episode – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable · 20 Jan 2026 podcast

So what begins to happen, just as Quakers are saying that

you should give a second thought to the political discourse that you're pushing because of the commitment to slavery here.

And maybe independence, political independence should also mean liberty for enslaved Africans.

You've got folks on the other side of the Atlantic saying, you don't deserve the liberty that you're petitioning for because you're hypocrites.

You're not actually committed to slavery.

You're not actually committed to natural rights.

You're just trying to get out of paying your taxes.

You don't want to actually listen to and obey parliament.

You're trying to overthrow the constitutional order.

And so what starts to happen is

in the years before the Declaration of Independence, is an attribution of guilt by British polemicists saying to North American colonists, I don't want to hear your liberty talk from a bunch of slaveholders.

And a political elite in North America that starts saying, in almost kind of a schoolyard way, well, there wouldn't be slaves here if British slave ships didn't bring them here.

And so what starts to happen is this use of the issue of slavery as a way to say something... Criticize your political opponents.

Exactly.

The institution of slavery had never been used this way before.

It had never become a kind of an arrow in the quiver of political debate.

And obviously it draws on an old notion that there is something morally reprehensible about slaveholding and slave trading.

The tendency, though, had been to think of that as being, at least in the Atlantic world, as the way it had evolved, kind of how the world worked.

And what starts to happen because of this political dispute is that on both sides of the Atlantic,

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