Tom Holland

speaker

195 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 1 Jul

Tom Holland’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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On the Media · The Rest Is History · 1 Jul 2026 podcast

And the notion that there can be no slavery in Britain, that a slave who steps foot on British soil as a result of that becomes free is starting to bed down. voice-verified

And you have those historically salient ideals of political liberty blurring with religious concerns about it, which are deriving from Quakers, from evangelicals. voice-verified

So you have a political and you have a religious project that is starting to look at the institution of slavery and to question it very, very radically. voice-verified

And this is happening in exactly the decades where the revolution is brewing in the United States. voice-verified

I think that that sets up a kind of massive, massive accusation of hypocrisy that enemies of the revolution can aim at the revolutionaries in America, British critics, of whom, again, Samuel Johnson is the most famous. voice-verified

And he has, what is it? voice-verified

How is it that it is the drivers of Negro from whom we hear the loudest yelps for liberty? voice-verified

He wanted it gone, didn't he? voice-verified

Yeah. voice-verified

I mean, he wanted slavery gone. voice-verified

He absolutely was passionately committed to it. voice-verified

And he was furious when those passages then got written out. voice-verified

But, you know, when he dies, he does not even do what Washington did and try and free most of his slaves. voice-verified

I mean, I think that it is right that the project of establishing a viable colonial project in North America and in the Caribbean for the British was dependent on forced labour. voice-verified

There was no way in which it could really be viable without that. voice-verified

And the British came up with... It's initially the English, but then in due course the British. voice-verified

They... voice-verified

are always looking around for sources of labour. voice-verified

So to begin with, it's usually transported people from Britain. voice-verified

So lots in the civil wars of the mid 17th century, Scots are transported there, Irish are transported there. voice-verified

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