Annual Lecture in the History of Slavery

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.
 

The research community is also invited to attend a roundtable in connection to the lecture:

“Writing the History of Abolition in the Age of Revolutions: Reflections on Moral Capital at 20”

Panel: Prof Christopher Brown (Columbia), Dr Joseph La Hausse de Lalouvière (HCA), Prof Diana Paton (HCA), and Prof Richard Whatmore (St Andrews)

Chaired by Dr Sonia Tycko (HCA)

15 October 2025, 14:10–15:30 @ 40 George Square, LG.09, Edinburgh