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
directly challenged what at that point was a very idealistic notion that abolition and emancipation were essentially the elaboration of British values and British commitments to liberty and law and civilization, that there was a kind of an incipient abolitionism in British culture.
And Williams, bringing a much more cynical point of view, said, no, this is an economic motivation from beginning to end.
This doesn't get talked about enough.
But Williams, when he wrote that in 1944, was drawing on a whole body of thought from the 19th century by Britain's competitors, especially France and Spain.
that were quite sure that especially the abolition of the slave trade was some sort of British stratagem to throw all of the benefits of the plantation economies in the services of British capitalism.
Now, the grounds on which they made that argument is very complicated.
I'm not sure we need to get into all of that.
Those outside of Britain had been saying that there must have been economic interests at work in the 19th century, that this is not just a story of humanitarianism and idealism and religion.
and all those kinds of things.
So Eric Williams was drawing on that tradition.
And it's an argument that after 1944 was largely ignored for many years and then contested, challenged intensively in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s by historians, especially economic historians who, as we say today, ran the numbers and challenged the empirical basis
for Williams's arguments.
And, you know, it still remains a matter of controversy today.
You know, most of us who work on the subject no longer accept the crudest version of Williams's formulation that slave trade abolition was a response to declining profits in the British West Indies.
Nor is there evidence
as ready in acceptance that emancipation was a kind of a mercy killing of a dying economy.
Most folks who, not all, but many economic historians who've really sort of studied this carefully have argued, somewhat counterfactually, that if the slave trade had not been abolished, British slavery would have thrived through the 19th century.
And slavery in many parts of the British West Indies at the time of emancipation was still flourishing and could have continued to grow if emancipation had not occurred.
So the argument has been challenged on the grounds that the prospects for economic growth, if the slave trade and slavery had remained in place, the prognosis was really, really good.
And so abolition and emancipation from that point of view did not make economic sense.
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