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

And so I have ended up, in the work that I did on this subject many years ago, going back to the story of some of those key individuals

to try to understand the position they took as founders of a movement for which there really was not much precedent.

And so I went back to people like Thomas Clarkson, to William Wilberforce, to Hannah Moore, to some of the elite Anglican evangelicals gathered in later years at Clapham.

Less known, but really important figures like James Ramsey or an early activist, Granville Sharp.

The movement comes to fruition in the late 1780s because of the choices that those individuals made.

And also because of choices that the collectivity of English Quakers made.

And maybe we'll get into this a little bit.

The challenge, if you want to understand how social movements begin...

is to try to figure out what moves the first movers.

And my conviction, at least in this case, after spending many, many years researching and writing and thinking about these folks, is that you need to understand them in the round, not just as abolitionists, but as people with histories

emotions, personalities, and commitments, convictions, values that are not about slavery, but that very much inform the choices they make around slavery.

So there's a way that my thinking about this increasingly migrates towards the biographical, but not with the intention of celebrating heroes, but trying to almost diagnose

the peculiar features of personalities who do peculiar things.

I don't want to tell.

I think the politics of the American Revolution put the question of slavery on the political agenda in a way that was lasting.

I don't think it was possible to use the cliche to put the genie back in the bottle after the way the issue of slavery gets batted around because of the politics.

But it could have worked out a variety of different ways.

It did not have to necessarily lead to a push to end the British slave trade beginning in the 1780s.

But I do think

And certainly the success of that effort would not be guaranteed by any means.

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