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 I'm just talking about the European context right now.
When Europeans arrived in the Americas, they started enslaving Native Americans.
And when that became politically difficult and costly, you know, they turned to West Africans where they already had an experience of West African captives who would come up through North Africa into the Mediterranean.
You know, the story of the conquest, the settlement of the Americas is partially about the involuntary migration of West Africans.
I mean, one colleague I have has made the argument something like two-thirds to three-quarters of the migrants to the Americas down to the 1800s were of African descent.
We think about migration often as a European story into the Americas, but at least down to the period of the French Revolution, there were far more African migrants to the Western Hemisphere than there were European migrants.
Yes, although what starts to become difficult is there are so many different forms of coercion, dependency on freedom.
And we use the term slavery to capture what is in fact a great variety of practices.
One challenge, for example, that modern audiences sometimes have is the idea that slaves were used to generate wealth as forced laborers.
Many societies, and this is especially true in the Middle East, in much of Islamic civilization, in large parts of South Asia, in parts of medieval, early modern East Asia, comes Korea, China.
Slaves were used for things that were employed in ways that were sometimes for sex, sometimes as the coerced loyal servants to the head of state.
So the practices of slavery are so varied.
What happens in the Americas is one really important iteration.
And if we're looking for sort of common features, you know, in some ways it's the social and legal fact of being possessed by another person and utilized as if you are a thing, which is to say as if you have no will of your own.
And it's obviously a fiction because people do have wills of their own regardless of how, you know, subjugated they are.
But what slavery in some ways attempts to achieve is a dehumanization of the human.
And so when scholars look to try to identify slavery in other times and other places, often what they're battening on is they're focusing on is that set of practices.
But yeah, but it's not, it wasn't invented in colonial America by any means.
Yeah.
Yeah, so this is also really interesting because it doesn't actually take a great deal of moral insight to see that slavery...
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