Claire Williams

speaker

137 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 9 Jul

Claire Williams’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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In Our Time · Machado de Assis · 9 Jul 2026 podcast

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Brazil as a nation was ostracised and looked down upon by the rest of the world while they were a slave-owning nation.

And the development of Brazil is quite unique in that it was a colony of Portugal for 300 years.

and then became an empire in 1822, a kind of constitutional monarchy.

And all this time, the economy was run largely on slavery.

This was something that was very much looked down upon by the rest of the world.

And Brazilian politicians and intellectuals were worried that they wouldn't be taken seriously as a modern nation until slavery had been abolished.

There are lots of thoughts about that.

Historians have written many tomes about that.

But because the politicians, the governing classes, were plantation owners, so a lot of money was at stake if they were going to give up their workforce.

But they did eventually.

So the slave trade ended in 1850 and gradually slavery was abolished in various waves through various laws.

And in 1888, it was abolished.

Exactly.

So 1889, Brazil becomes a republic.

Absolutely.

It's a novel where nothing happens and everything happens.

So you'd think from the title that it's the story of a life.

Then you realise that it's posthumous memoirs, so there's something strange going on.

He's dead when he's writing it.

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