2025 Annual Lecture in the History of Slavery - Professor Christopher Brown

What did the American Revolution mean for the Atlantic slave trade? The age of revolutions long has been understood as transformative, as starting the decline and fall of the Atlantic slave trade over the course of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, the limits of that interpretation become ever more apparent with the last two generations of research. We know now, for example, that the Atlantic slave trade reached its apex in the half-century after the Declaration of Independence. A persistent concern with the aftermath, moreover, has left the war itself overlooked. What happened to the Atlantic slave trade during the American War for Independence? That question gets overlooked and proves difficult to answer while the more general history of European competition on the West African coast during the Atlantic slave trade remains unwritten. This lecture presents the American Revolution as one chapter in that much longer story, one that locates the history of the Atlantic slave trade less in the history of morals or economics than in the history of statecraft.  

Professor Christopher Brown (Columbia University) is a historian of Britain and the British empire, principally in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with special emphasis on the comparative history of slavery and abolition, and with secondary interests in the Atlantic Slave Trade and the Age of Revolutions. His book Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (University of North Carolina Press) won the Frederick Douglass Prize, the Morris D. Forkosch Prize, and the James A. Rawley Prize.