Each year a guest lecturer presents research that furthers our understanding of the history of slavery and its impacts. The 2025 Lecture: The Atlantic Slave Trade and the American Revolution The most recent Annual Lecture in the History of Slavery was given by Professor Christopher Brown on 'The Atlantic Slave Trade and the American Revolution' in October, 2025. 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 presented 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. Academic roundtable The research community was 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). Previous Annual Lectures in the History of Slavery Past Lectures A series of lectures on ‘World Slavery from Antiquity to the Present’ was established in the Scottish Centre for Diaspora Studies in 2012 and has continued under within the ECGH since 2019.2012 – Professor David Richardson (Hull): ‘Why Was the British Slave Trade So Big?’2013 – Professor Walter Scheidel (Stanford): ‘Slavery and Forced Labor in Early China and the Roman World’2013 – Professor Philip Morgan (Johns Hopkins): ‘Caribbean Slavery’2014 – Professor Annette Gordon-Reed (Harvard): ‘The Hemingses of Monticello’2015 – Professor John Cairns (Edinburgh): ‘Manumitting Slaves: Eighteenth-Century Scotland and Ancient Rome’2015 – Professor Sir Hilary Beckles (University of the West Indies): ‘Britain’s Black Debt: Reparatory Justice for Slavery and Genocide in Caribbean Context’2016 – Professor Vincent Brown (Harvard): ‘The Coromantee War: Charting the Course of an Atlantic Slave Revolt’2019 – Professor Jennifer Morgan (New York University): ‘Reckoning With Slavery: Kinship and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic’2021 – Professor Ana Lucia Araujo (Howard): ‘Slavery in the Age of Memory: Britain, France and the United States’2022 – Professor Indrani Chatterjee (UT Austin): ‘Entangled Hierarchies: Of Varna-Jati, Casta and Slaves in Historic South Asia’2023 – Professor Brenda Stevenson (Oxford): ‘Slavery, Family and Resistance’2023 – Professor Daniel Smail (Harvard): ‘Slavery and the Pursuit of Freedom in Later Medieval Mediterranean Europe’2024 – Professor Benedetta Rossi (UCL): ‘The Problem of African Slavery in the Age of Abolition’2025 - Professor Christopher L. Brown (Columbia): 'The Atlantic Slave Trade and the American Revolution' This article was published on 2024-08-01
