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
And this is the reason why many of us take the art and that there's no reason, absent abolition, emancipation, that the institution could not have run into the early 20th century.
So let's set that argument aside.
So I'm going to tell you right now that I don't think the last word has been written on this subject at all.
And I think it's time for another generation of scholars to come back and reexamine the linkages with the great increase in empirical information that we have about slavery in the early 19th century in the British Empire and with the much more refined understanding that we have about the Industrial Revolution.
So I think in many respects the jury is still out on this subject.
Williams had the view that slavery provided essentially the startup capital for the Industrial Revolution and that the industries and captains of industry at the center of the new manufacturing economies then found it in their interest to turn around and destroy slavery.
because it no longer had served its purpose.
And so there's a real kind of both economic explanation of slavery's importance to the British economy, and then the British economy turning around and jettisoning slavery when it no longer serves its purpose.
There is no question about the synchronization between the two developments, although I will point out that economic historians debate among themselves exactly when the Industrial Revolution took place, when it began.
It seems like it was quite a gradual takeoff in a sense.
It's phases of its growth, right.
And so the whole notion of a kind of spectacular takeoff, which was such an important part of the literature when Williams wrote, is no longer the general understanding among scholars who work on the subject today.
It's an aspect of Williams' argument that has not aged terribly well.
Williams did something really interesting with this subject, and it will sound familiar.
Most of what he did is he connected, identified major bankers
uh major industrialists who also had major investments in the british west indies sometimes as plantation owners sometimes as merchants deal dealing with plantations so he did what we you know think of today as kind of uh naming names essentially right connecting particular individuals um who would become really important to the new manufacturing economies to finance uh to insurance to industry and showing their ties to the plantation economies
And that work continues to pace when people study who held slaves at the time of emancipation in 1833.
The problem is that it's not easy to segregate capital flows from one... There's no way you can say that slavery alone, obviously, for the reasons that you just described, was alone sufficient for an industrial revolution.
There are many places where there are significant slave profits related to the slave economy that did not industrialize in the way that Britain did.
In the Netherlands is the most famous...
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