#145 Classic episode – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable

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80,000 Hours Podcast 2h 56m 2 speakers 8 chapters transcribed 2 months ago

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What themes are introduced in the opening of the episode?

Rob Wiblin 0:00

Hey everyone, welcome back to our next holiday classic episode from back in 2023. Historian Christopher Brown is among the world's top experts on the Atlantic slavery abolition movement, but this is not exactly an episode just about slavery. It's an episode rather about whether we should reasonably expect to get more progress for free. Christopher here makes the case that the abolition of slavery was a genuinely contingent historical event, that there are nearby possible worlds that you and I could be living in where it simply never happened and where we would still have legal slavery today, despite also having all of the technological advances that we enjoy today. The broader point that Christopher is arguing is that becoming richer or spending more time at university doesn't push that strongly in favour of moral enlightenment.

Rob Wiblin 0:45

And that moral attitudes don't just always monotonically progress towards greater compassion, but that they do often also regress towards our basic instincts, or just remain stubbornly stuck where they happen to be. If he's right, and you'll have to decide how convinced you are, then we just can't coast on the assumption that humanity is going to figure out the right values to act on given time, given a couple of more centuries to do it, or some smart AI chatbots to talk to. And Christopher also has a lot to say about the gap between attitudes and actions. Why, as he sees it, awareness of a problem roughly never translates into a movement to fix what people don't like, and what it actually takes for the rare successful movement to get off the ground.

Rob Wiblin 1:25

Keep in mind if you're watching rather than listening to this, that this was an episode from three years ago. So it's a video episode from long before we were typically doing video. And so it's not the same visual feast you might be used to enjoying if you've been regularly watching the show on YouTube this year. With that small caveat out of the way, I bring you Christopher Brown on whether the abolition of slavery was or wasn't inevitable.

Christopher Brown 1:46

I've taken the view that the things that did happen that led to slave trade abolition and emancipation, given where the world had been in the 18th century, that the changes in the 19th century were not only not inevitable, but they were actually very unlikely. I ground that in the economic strength of of the Atlantic slave trade and the economic value of slavery in the 19th century, even in the face of abolitionist and emancipationist movements. There is no record, at least that I'm aware of, of slave traders or slaveholding societies saying that they had had enough and they weren't going to do this anymore. Slaving is as old as human history, and I think we tend to forget it was a norm rather than an exception.

Christopher Brown 2:44

What happens in the 19th century I really think is quite unusual, and I don't think it's the natural consequences of either economic forces or cultural forces.

Why does Christopher Brown argue that slavery abolition was not inevitable?

Rob Wiblin 3:00

Today, I'm speaking with Christopher Leslie Brown. Christopher is a professor of history at Columbia University, specializing in the history of the British Empire during the 17th and 18th centuries, in particular slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, and the movement for its abolition. Years ago, he did his DPhil at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship before returning to the US to work at Rutgers University, then Johns Hopkins University, and finally Columbia University, where he teaches and supervises doctoral students on these topics to this very day. He's the author of Moral Capital, Foundations of British Abolitionism, as well as Arming Slaves from the Classical Era to the Modern Age. And he's written for the New York Times, the London Review of Books, among many other outlets.

Rob Wiblin 3:35

Thanks for coming on the podcast, Christopher. Very glad to be here. Thank you for the invitation. I hope we're going to get to talk about how slavery was abolished and whether or not that was an inevitability. But first, what are your main research interests and other projects these days?

Christopher Brown 3:49

Yeah, so right now, I've now turned to working on the Atlantic slave trade itself.

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Chapters

8 chapters

1 What themes are introduced in the opening of the episode? 0:00–3:00 2 Why does Christopher Brown argue that slavery abolition was not inevitable? 3:00–8:39 3 What unique factors contributed to the British abolitionist movement? 8:39–27:23 4 How did Quaker beliefs influence anti-slavery sentiments? 27:23–1:26:07 5 What legal challenges did slavery face in Britain? 1:26:07–1:26:34 6 How did the Somerset case impact slavery laws? 1:26:34–1:26:44 7 What factors contributed to the success of the anti-slavery movement? 1:26:44–1:27:28 8 How did the political climate influence the abolition of slavery? 1:27:28–2:56:15

Speakers

2 identified

Christopher Brown 128 min Rob Wiblin 36 min

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Topics in this episode

New York Times 1 Columbia University 1 University of Oxford 1 Johns Hopkins 1 Rutgers 1 British Empire 2 London Review of Books 1 John Wesley 1 Thomas Clarkson 1 Will McCaskill 1 Granville Sharp 1 Atlantic slave trade 1

Source

Recorded20 Jan 2026

Publisherfeeds.transistor.fm ↗

Transcriptspeaker-named · 100+ languages

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Show notes

In many ways, humanity seems to have become more humane and inclusive over time. While there’s still a lot of progress to be made, campaigns to give people of different genders, races, sexualities, ethnicities, beliefs, and abilities equal treatment and rights have had significant success.It’s tempting to believe this was inevitable — that the arc of history “bends toward justice,” and that as humans get richer, we’ll make even more moral progress.But today's guest Christopher Brown — a professor of history at Columbia University and specialist in the abolitionist movement and the British Empire during the 18th and 19th centuries — believes the story of how slavery became unacceptable suggests moral progress is far from inevitable.Rebroadcast: This episode was originally aired in February 2023.Links to learn more, video, and full transcript: https://80k.link/CLBWhile most of us today feel that the abolition of slavery was sure to happen sooner or later as humans became richer and more educated, Christopher doesn't believe any of the arguments for that conclusion pass muster. If he's right, a counterfactual history where slavery remains widespread in 2023 isn't so far-fetched.As Christopher lays out in his two key books, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism and Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age, slavery has been ubiquitous throughout history. Slavery of some form was fundamental in Classical Greece, the Roman Empire, in much of the Islamic civilisation, in South Asia, and in parts of early modern East Asia, Korea, China.It was justified on all sorts of grounds that sound mad to us today. But according to Christopher, while there’s evidence that slavery was questioned in many of these civilisations, and periodically attacked by slaves themselves, there was no enduring or successful moral advocacy against slavery until the British abolitionist movement of the 1700s.That movement first conquered Britain and its empire, then eventually the whole world. But the fact that there's only a single time in history that a persistent effort to ban slavery got off the ground is a big clue that opposition to slavery was a contingent matter: if abolition had been inevitable, we’d expect to see multiple independent abolitionist movements thoroughly history, providing redundancy should any one of them fail.Christopher argues that this rarity is primarily down to the enormous economic and cultural incentives to deny the moral repugnancy of slavery, and crush opposition to it with violence wherever necessary.Mere awareness is insufficient to guarantee a movement will arise to fix a problem. Humanity continues to allow many severe injustices to persist, despite being aware of them. So why is it so hard to imagine we might have done the same with forced labour?In this episode, Christopher describes the unique and peculiar set of political, social and religious circumstances that gave rise to the only successful and lasting anti-slavery movement in human history. These circumstances were sufficiently improbable that Christopher believes there are very nearby worlds where abolitionism might never have taken off.Christopher and host Rob Wiblin also discuss:Various instantiations of slavery throughout human historySigns of antislavery sentiment before the 17th centuryThe role of the Quakers in early British abolitionist movementThe importance of individual “heroes” in the abolitionist movementArguments against the idea that the abolition of slavery was contingentWhether there have ever been any major moral shifts that were inevitableChapters:Rob's intro (00:00:00)Cold open (00:01:45)Who's Christopher Brown? (00:03:00)Was abolitionism inevitable? (00:08:53)The history of slavery (00:14:35)Signs of antislavery sentiment before the 17th century (00:19:24)Quakers (00:32:37)Attitudes to slavery in other religions (00:44:37)Quaker advocacy (00:56:28)Inevitability and contingency (01:06:29)Moral revolution (01:16:39)The importance of specific individuals (01:29:23)Later stages of the antislavery movement (01:41:33)Economic theory of abolition (01:55:27)Influence of knowledge work and education (02:12:15)Moral foundations theory (02:20:43)Figuring out how contingent events are (02:32:42)Least bad argument for why abolition was inevitable (02:41:45)Were any major moral shifts inevitable? (02:47:29)Producer: Keiran HarrisAudio mastering: Milo McGuireTranscriptions: Katy Moore

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