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

Are you looking at the most micro of scales or the most macro of scales?

To me, the reason why I think about the emergence of

of anti-slavery campaigns is contingent is because there's no real precedent and there's no real comparison at the time.

So there's not anything, it's not building on anything else that's like it.

And not only that, it was largely unimaginable before it occurred, right?

So that's the first part of it.

The second part of it is that the circumstances

are circumstances that were very particular to that moment that enabled it.

I guess really the point I want to make is that in thinking about how we make sense of the past, it's perfectly possible to make it all about contingency or perfectly possible to make it all about this sort of evolutionary point of view.

And in some ways, it's a matter of perspective.

It's a matter in some ways of taste in what you are interested in.

I really believe and I really think that slavery is a institution, as a set of practices, is so normal in human civilizations down to the 18th century that it took something special

for it to become controversial and a target for intervention.

And so I don't think that every movement is equally contingent.

I mean, I would say, for example, that I think manufacturing, the sort of industrial development, is less surprising retrospectively than the challenge to slavery and the end of slavery is.

Let's put it that way.

I think the development of a women's rights movement in the 19th century is less surprising given the development of an anti-slavery movement in the decades before.

You know, you might say, this is hardly my field, but you might say that World War II is not terribly surprising given the settlement of World War I. Now, I'm sure there are people who would get into the contingencies of that, but I don't think...

We'll put it another way.

The grounds...

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