Christopher Brown

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

It's not outlawed.

It's just that it's not lawful either.

And so there's this really interesting sort of legal twilight that slavery exists in, where because these are British colonists, they come back to England, they come back to Scotland with slaves in tow.

And there's nobody that says that they can't do that.

There's also no law that says that they can do that.

Right?

Right.

So this is the importance of—some people will have heard of the Somerset case of 1772.

We're just having the 250th year anniversary of that this year, so there's been some discussion and new focus on it among scholars.

And it really is an important moment because it's a decision—

that essentially involves the question of what powers do slaveholders in England have over their slaves in a society where there's no slave law.

And the judgment is that slaveholders, whatever their powers are, they are not allowed to ship slaves out of the country.

Now, if you think about it, if you don't have the power to dispose of an enslaved man and woman the way you want, they can run away.

There's no way to recover them.

There's no fugitive slave law.

There's nothing that provides the infrastructure to support slaves.

And so it's a judgment that was taken as a sign that English common law did not recognize slavery and would not enforce the rights of slaveholders.

And this happened just in the moment

um, where the, uh, existence, pervasiveness of slaveholding in North America had become really important.

So yeah, so you've got, you've got, um, in Scotland and England and Ireland, um, a world in which slaveholding in Wales is, is, is not, you know, there are no slave laws.

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