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
Well, I mean, the first thing to say, and it's very easy to miss this, but it's fundamental.
Enslaved men and women did whatever they could to get out of the status of being slaves.
And they did that individually.
They did it collectively.
And so I want to be clear that in talking about anti-slavery today,
You know, you and I are talking about what we'll mostly be talking about is the efforts by people who are neither slaveholders nor slaves to challenge that system.
You know, it's quite correct to see slave rebellions, uprisings as a manifestation of an anti-slavery mindset.
So I want to be really clear about that.
Yeah.
From a collective point of view, no.
I mean, there are not movements as such that are aimed at the abolition of slavery itself.
Now, there are some...
You know, there are moments, for example, in the mid-16th century, there's a great debate in the Spanish court around whether the enslavement of Native Americans in Mexico and Peru and South America and the Caribbean has legal and moral legitimacy.
You know, and famously the friar Bartolome de las Casas, you know, with several others, challenges whether the crown has the right to enslave the people that they have conquered.
And there are all kinds of limits that are put on in consequence of the kinds of coercion that can be put in place.
But this is what kind of anti-slavery looks like really prior to the 18th century, which is specific challenges to specific practices among specific people in particular specific moments and places, rather than the much grander view that slavery itself everywhere as practiced is illegitimate and therefore should be struck from the face of the earth.
It's such an interesting question, Rob, because it really goes to our question of what we mean by success.
And the Haitian Revolution does set a kind of a standard by which all other
rebellions against slavery in the Americas anyway is measured because the insurgents overthrew what was at the time the wealthiest, most prosperous slave colony in the Americas and perhaps the most prosperous of any that had ever existed.
And how that happened has a lot to do with the specifics of that revolutionary moment and the specifics of Saint-Domingue.
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