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
Yeah, I mean, the military part of it I'm less sure about.
But this is where one of the real challenges for this kind of subject, Rob, is it depends on who and what we're talking about.
Because if you look at the British Empire as a whole, the economic argument for abolition and emancipation were not particularly strong.
If you look at particular places in particular moments, you can see how there would be individual economic interests that might be a little bit like the Pennsylvanians or New Englanders of an early generation, which is to say...
They did not favor emancipation, but they were not as opposed to it as some others might be, right?
Because there were some colonies—Barbados is a very good example—that had declined in profitability, that were not as—especially after slave trade abolition, where slavery was—
you know, have been really weakened.
There are very important strategic reasons, not necessarily economic ones, but strategic reasons why abolition made sense in 1807.
And the proportion of the elite who are committed to slavery by the 1820s, early 1830s is declining.
And there is a growing belief that free labor is morally superior and potentially, it's argued, economically superior.
Now, abolitionists try to make that argument.
Slaveholders say, you have no idea what you're talking about.
You try free labor here, nothing is going to get done.
And they turn out to be largely right.
But there's a series of economic arguments that start getting made in the 1810s, 1820s, early 1830s that are questioning the economic utility of slavery.
But there is no known instance, at least one that I can think of, in the Americas where slaveholders...
decided that they were going to essentially liquidate slavery, abandon it because it was no longer economically profitable.
The people who are engaged in the business are quite sure it's economically profitable.
So a bunch of folks who are living somewhere else saying, you know, this system has run its course.
Well, that might be true to them, but it's not true to the folks who are actually invested in it.
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