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

But because there has been a massive infrastructure of exporting slaves from Africa to the Spanish New World, largely being done by the Portuguese, that exists. voice-verified

That is a framework of exploitation that is ready to be used. voice-verified

And the English have begun trying to muscle in on this very early on. voice-verified

So some of the earliest voyages that Francis Drake, the great kind of maritime hero of the reign of Elizabeth I... voice-verified

that he does is he goes on a slaving expedition. voice-verified

I think that, so by the early 18th century, the fact that not just America, North America, but the Caribbean as well, is dependent on slavery is becoming a vast moral and economic crisis for people across that British Atlantic world. voice-verified

And the opposition to it is being bred by the scale of horror that the growing industrialization of the British Empire in the 18th century is generating. voice-verified

I think one of the things that... voice-verified

that people now might get wrong is the idea that the British Empire is dependent on slavery. voice-verified

I think it's the other way around. voice-verified

I think it is the fact that Britain is industrializing that makes the exploitation of slavery brutal and unspeakable to a degree that had not previously been witnessed. voice-verified

It is voice-verified

hideous. voice-verified

So there's a passage in the Marquis de Sade, I think it's Juliet, where he is writing with immense approval of all the horrors and tortures and violence that ancient empires had inflicted. voice-verified

And he says that none of our modern states can compare with the Persians or the Romans for their cruelties. voice-verified

The only exception I will make are the English colonists in the Caribbean and the Atlantic seaboard of North America. voice-verified

They know the horrors and he lists the horrors in kind of great detail. voice-verified

And I think that you can see, so there's a kind of representative figure who is a Quaker from Essex in England called Benjamin Lay, who goes to the Caribbean and witnesses the horrors there. voice-verified

And he's so appalled that he has a kind of religious conversion. voice-verified

And he then goes to America, to Philadelphia, because he's hoping that, you know, this is the great city of the Quakers. voice-verified

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