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
But I don't think it was possible after the American Revolution to treat the institution of slavery as a kind of feature of the world that as a moral issue was no one's responsibility.
Anybody listening to this discussion who knows the subject is going to roll their eyes when they hear what I have to say.
But I don't think there's any way that you cannot come back to Thomas Clarkson.
And the reason why I say that is because
He is really the first person who thinks that there should be a national public movement against the British slave trade.
And he's so committed to that purpose that it becomes basically the sole work of his life until it's achieved in 1807.
And there's no other person who has the same level of vision or same level of commitment to the purpose.
So that's the reason why I would identify Clarkson.
I mean, there are very important moments, decisions made by the Quakers immediately after the American Revolution in Britain, which are consequential.
There are some really formative anti-slavery publications by a guy named James Ramsey that shape the debate in ways that are lasting.
But as far as the movement goes, I just think that Thomas Clarkson is really essential to what ends up emerging.
It's very hard to document, but in the immediate aftermath of the American War for Independence, there is a brief but profound couple of years where a reflection on what went wrong is...
is just circulating among the British elite.
And there is a sense that the loss of North America says that in one way or another, as a pollster say today, the empire was on the wrong track, right?
That there was just a kind of a, it was a indication that,
that there were either in terms of governance or in terms of orientation or in terms of execution, that the overseas colonies were vulnerable.
And some of those interpreted that as we need to look at this question of the slave trade and of slavery in the British West Indies.
That was not the majority opinion by any means, but it kind of created a space for folks who already had
reservations to, you know, to pose questions that had not really been posed before.
There's 50 years between the beginning of the anti-slavery movement and the ban on slave holding in the British Empire.
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