Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism with Christopher L. Brown

Why did an antislavery movement emerge at the time of the American Revolution, both in the American colonies and in Britain?  Christopher Brown asks this question and many more in Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism.  The American Revolution on both sides of the Atlantic brought together strands of thought and feeling which had been latent, as men and women grappled with questions of power and justice.  Abolition was one way for Britons to restore their moral capital, and drew on many sources—economic, moral, religious.  In a fascinating study Christopher Brown upends much of what we thought we knew about the antislavery movement, and allows us to see the 18th-century world with fresh eyes.

Transcript

WEBVTT
 
 00:00:00.981 --> 00:00:01.921
 Good morning, everyone.
 
 00:00:01.962 --> 00:00:03.523
 Welcome to the Revolution Two-Fifty
 
 00:00:03.563 --> 00:00:04.144
 podcast.
 
 00:00:04.184 --> 00:00:05.004
 I'm Bob Allison.
 
 00:00:05.065 --> 00:00:07.767
 I chair the Rev Two-Fifty advisory group.
 
 00:00:07.786 --> 00:00:09.788
 We're a consortium of about seventy five
 
 00:00:09.808 --> 00:00:11.429
 groups in Massachusetts planning
 
 00:00:11.449 --> 00:00:12.971
 commemorations of the beginnings of
 
 00:00:13.051 --> 00:00:14.413
 American independence.
 
 00:00:14.432 --> 00:00:16.795
 And our guest today is Christopher Leslie
 
 00:00:16.815 --> 00:00:17.175
 Brown,
 
 00:00:17.216 --> 00:00:19.216
 who is a professor of history at Columbia
 
 00:00:19.297 --> 00:00:22.500
 University and the author of Moral Capital
 
 00:00:22.780 --> 00:00:24.661
 Foundations of British Abolitionism.
 
 00:00:24.681 --> 00:00:26.044
 So, Chris, thanks so much for joining us.
 
 00:00:27.001 --> 00:00:29.060
 It's so great to be here and to
 
 00:00:29.080 --> 00:00:30.902
 be in conversation with you, Bob.
 
 00:00:30.922 --> 00:00:31.242
 Thank you.
 
 00:00:31.262 --> 00:00:32.182
 You'll have to forgive me.
 
 00:00:32.241 --> 00:00:33.201
 I'm in New York City.
 
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 It means that there's street noise
 
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 sometimes.
 
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 So the ambulance went by.
 
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 OK.
 
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 Great to be here.
 
 00:00:41.122 --> 00:00:43.384
 Good to have you.
 
 00:00:43.884 --> 00:00:45.944
 And your book really addresses one of
 
 00:00:45.963 --> 00:00:48.604
 these great questions that we have the
 
 00:00:48.625 --> 00:00:50.384
 British Empire taking control, really,
 
 00:00:50.445 --> 00:00:52.265
 of the transatlantic slave trade in the
 
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 eighteenth century and also an anti-slave
 
 00:01:02.841 --> 00:01:05.152
 and what provokes it and why in the
 
 00:01:05.191 --> 00:01:06.156
 seventeen eighties.
 
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 Why The Seventeen Agents?
 
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 Yeah,
 
 00:01:21.331 --> 00:01:24.751
 so it's the puzzle that the book is
 
 00:01:25.231 --> 00:01:26.352
 trying to solve.
 
 00:01:26.492 --> 00:01:28.533
 And I think I just want to take
 
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 one step backwards and just explain why
 
 00:01:32.974 --> 00:01:37.915
 this felt like something to write about.
 
 00:01:37.956 --> 00:01:39.256
 I think a lot of us have in
 
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 our own experience
 
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 that kind of tension between the things
 
 00:01:43.850 --> 00:01:46.533
 that we believe in and what we do.
 
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 And there's all kinds of ways that we
 
 00:01:50.617 --> 00:01:53.459
 have kind of commitments to ideals in the
 
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 abstract,
 
 00:01:54.281 --> 00:01:55.822
 but then when we're challenged in our
 
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 daily lives,
 
 00:01:56.563 --> 00:02:00.007
 it's kind of how we sort of respond
 
 00:02:00.027 --> 00:02:00.487
 to those.
 
 00:02:01.743 --> 00:02:02.805
 respond to those challenges.
 
 00:02:02.844 --> 00:02:06.248
 So the whole book in some ways pivots
 
 00:02:06.328 --> 00:02:07.188
 on the problem,
 
 00:02:07.289 --> 00:02:10.251
 the distance between our moral sentiments
 
 00:02:10.270 --> 00:02:11.312
 and moral actions.
 
 00:02:11.611 --> 00:02:13.894
 And there was nothing especially,
 
 00:02:14.674 --> 00:02:18.758
 it doesn't take a lot of great insight
 
 00:02:18.858 --> 00:02:22.099
 to realize that holding people in slavery
 
 00:02:22.159 --> 00:02:22.860
 is wrong.
 
 00:02:23.901 --> 00:02:27.123
 But the benefits, individual benefits,
 
 00:02:27.365 --> 00:02:28.164
 national benefits,
 
 00:02:28.185 --> 00:02:30.206
 and imperial benefits were so substantial
 
 00:02:31.118 --> 00:02:34.200
 that it was very easy for people in
 
 00:02:34.260 --> 00:02:35.461
 Britain to overlook.
 
 00:02:35.501 --> 00:02:36.762
 So a lot of the project,
 
 00:02:37.042 --> 00:02:38.883
 the book was about trying to make sense
 
 00:02:38.923 --> 00:02:43.585
 of how that gap gets closed between moral
 
 00:02:43.685 --> 00:02:45.906
 sentiment and moral action.
 
 00:02:46.846 --> 00:02:51.487
 And basically it happens right in this
 
 00:02:51.608 --> 00:02:52.027
 moment,
 
 00:02:52.168 --> 00:02:54.188
 in the immediate aftermath of the American
 
 00:02:54.229 --> 00:02:54.889
 Revolution.
 
 00:02:54.930 --> 00:02:57.570
 And I really think that...
 
 00:02:58.655 --> 00:03:02.616
 part of the change is the ways that
 
 00:03:04.096 --> 00:03:05.776
 the relationship to slavery gets
 
 00:03:05.836 --> 00:03:08.477
 politicized in ways that it had never been
 
 00:03:08.516 --> 00:03:09.016
 before.
 
 00:03:10.537 --> 00:03:15.518
 The patriots on one side saying, you know,
 
 00:03:15.538 --> 00:03:17.937
 Britain is a nation of slave traders.
 
 00:03:19.098 --> 00:03:21.158
 And this is part of the, you know,
 
 00:03:21.199 --> 00:03:24.019
 we're engaged in a drive for liberty.
 
 00:03:25.699 --> 00:03:27.039
 And then on the other side, you know,
 
 00:03:27.219 --> 00:03:27.560
 British,
 
 00:03:29.479 --> 00:03:32.421
 opinion makers and politicians saying
 
 00:03:32.861 --> 00:03:34.823
 American slaveholders do not have a right
 
 00:03:34.864 --> 00:03:38.346
 to the kind of freedom they're aspiring
 
 00:03:38.406 --> 00:03:38.566
 to.
 
 00:03:38.586 --> 00:03:39.347
 So it's just,
 
 00:03:39.387 --> 00:03:41.228
 it's that particular kind of moment of
 
 00:03:41.288 --> 00:03:45.372
 crisis that brings the issue forward in a
 
 00:03:45.431 --> 00:03:47.652
 way that was really unprecedented.
 
 00:03:47.793 --> 00:03:49.175
 Right, right.
 
 00:03:49.194 --> 00:03:50.855
 You do say that the revolution offers up
 
 00:03:50.996 --> 00:03:52.796
 identifiable villains for each side.
 
 00:03:52.817 --> 00:03:53.337
 That's right.
 
 00:03:55.399 --> 00:03:55.879
 That's right.
 
 00:03:56.985 --> 00:03:59.850
 Yeah, so it's, I don't know.
 
 00:03:59.871 --> 00:04:00.471
 I mean,
 
 00:04:00.651 --> 00:04:02.594
 the way the world that we live in
 
 00:04:02.694 --> 00:04:03.115
 now,
 
 00:04:04.479 --> 00:04:04.639
 You know,
 
 00:04:04.658 --> 00:04:06.139
 we live in a world where there's a
 
 00:04:06.199 --> 00:04:07.960
 kind of an anti-slavery consensus.
 
 00:04:07.979 --> 00:04:10.420
 You will not find anyone anywhere making a
 
 00:04:10.501 --> 00:04:12.521
 positive argument for why slavery is a
 
 00:04:12.562 --> 00:04:13.042
 good thing.
 
 00:04:13.081 --> 00:04:14.962
 And we know that human trafficking exists
 
 00:04:14.983 --> 00:04:16.343
 in all kinds of different ways.
 
 00:04:17.062 --> 00:04:18.283
 But it's illegal, it's illicit,
 
 00:04:18.363 --> 00:04:19.223
 it's underground.
 
 00:04:20.904 --> 00:04:24.946
 And that sense that being invested in
 
 00:04:25.026 --> 00:04:29.927
 slavery is a sign of, you know,
 
 00:04:29.987 --> 00:04:30.987
 is stigmatized.
 
 00:04:31.408 --> 00:04:33.629
 is something to be embarrassed about or to
 
 00:04:33.689 --> 00:04:35.209
 try to explain or defend away,
 
 00:04:35.249 --> 00:04:37.629
 that's a direct consequence of the
 
 00:04:37.670 --> 00:04:39.569
 politics of the American Revolution.
 
 00:04:40.930 --> 00:04:42.130
 So yeah,
 
 00:04:42.151 --> 00:04:43.870
 it really is the seventeen seventies and
 
 00:04:43.891 --> 00:04:46.052
 seventeen eighties that it kind of comes
 
 00:04:46.091 --> 00:04:48.273
 to fruition.
 
 00:04:48.312 --> 00:04:49.872
 So why is this?
 
 00:04:49.932 --> 00:04:51.132
 I mean, I was telling you earlier,
 
 00:04:51.153 --> 00:04:52.793
 I had this experience taking a group of
 
 00:04:52.834 --> 00:04:54.793
 students to the Shirley Eustace House in
 
 00:04:54.834 --> 00:04:55.475
 Roxbury,
 
 00:04:55.495 --> 00:04:56.975
 home of the British royal governor,
 
 00:04:57.014 --> 00:04:57.754
 William Shirley.
 
 00:04:57.834 --> 00:04:57.975
 Yeah.
 
 00:04:58.074 --> 00:04:59.055
 You came here,
 
 00:04:59.076 --> 00:05:00.755
 you met with liveried servants,
 
 00:05:07.483 --> 00:05:09.324
 the British were abolitionists.
 
 00:05:09.363 --> 00:05:09.483
 Well,
 
 00:05:09.504 --> 00:05:10.584
 that's what the British wanted you to
 
 00:05:10.624 --> 00:05:11.324
 think too.
 
 00:05:12.204 --> 00:05:13.944
 That's right.
 
 00:05:14.745 --> 00:05:18.047
 There's that great line from somewhere in
 
 00:05:18.127 --> 00:05:20.608
 Eric Williams' work where he writes,
 
 00:05:21.247 --> 00:05:22.769
 you get the sense from the way the
 
 00:05:22.788 --> 00:05:24.548
 British talked about the subject that they
 
 00:05:24.608 --> 00:05:27.209
 had invented slavery so they could have
 
 00:05:27.250 --> 00:05:30.911
 the pleasure of abolishing it.
 
 00:05:31.632 --> 00:05:32.492
 For so long,
 
 00:05:32.531 --> 00:05:35.913
 the story about Britain and slavery was
 
 00:05:35.954 --> 00:05:36.394
 about
 
 00:05:37.059 --> 00:05:39.579
 the singularity of the British
 
 00:05:39.660 --> 00:05:41.100
 anti-slavery movement,
 
 00:05:42.160 --> 00:05:44.221
 the leadership and the suppression of the
 
 00:05:44.261 --> 00:05:45.581
 Atlantic slave trade,
 
 00:05:46.822 --> 00:05:50.562
 the choice that Parliament made in the
 
 00:05:50.682 --> 00:05:54.264
 year to pay out twenty million pounds to
 
 00:05:54.824 --> 00:05:57.108
 emancipate so all of that became a kind
 
 00:05:57.127 --> 00:05:59.492
 of story about britain's national identity
 
 00:05:59.932 --> 00:06:01.394
 and one that's come you know that come
 
 00:06:01.514 --> 00:06:03.939
 right down until you know relatively
 
 00:06:03.978 --> 00:06:05.682
 recent years so the students are not it's
 
 00:06:05.742 --> 00:06:07.324
 not surprising they would have that yeah
 
 00:06:07.425 --> 00:06:07.644
 yeah
 
 00:06:24.872 --> 00:06:28.134
 really do a good job of delimiting who
 
 00:06:28.173 --> 00:06:31.315
 he was and what his objective was in
 
 00:06:31.355 --> 00:06:33.396
 starting to attack slavery.
 
 00:06:34.237 --> 00:06:34.557
 Yeah.
 
 00:06:35.218 --> 00:06:36.439
 Yeah, Granville Sharp is a,
 
 00:06:37.298 --> 00:06:41.901
 he's a really eccentric character and very
 
 00:06:41.982 --> 00:06:42.581
 singular.
 
 00:06:43.283 --> 00:06:43.822
 You know,
 
 00:06:43.843 --> 00:06:46.163
 he's a kind of government bureaucrat.
 
 00:06:46.244 --> 00:06:47.805
 He worked at the Board of Ordinance of
 
 00:06:47.865 --> 00:06:48.605
 all places,
 
 00:06:48.625 --> 00:06:50.447
 which is responsible for munitions.
 
 00:06:52.216 --> 00:06:53.877
 But he was also the grandson of an
 
 00:06:54.538 --> 00:06:57.860
 archbishop and part of a very large
 
 00:06:58.980 --> 00:06:59.519
 family,
 
 00:07:00.100 --> 00:07:01.740
 well-placed in the Church of England,
 
 00:07:03.201 --> 00:07:05.603
 and had a kind of a really unusual
 
 00:07:07.084 --> 00:07:09.124
 sense of, I mean,
 
 00:07:09.163 --> 00:07:10.944
 everyone has a sense of right and wrong,
 
 00:07:10.985 --> 00:07:13.206
 but he has a very profound sense of,
 
 00:07:13.706 --> 00:07:15.406
 in his own individual life,
 
 00:07:18.088 --> 00:07:20.750
 very easy to get prompted by things that
 
 00:07:20.769 --> 00:07:21.971
 he felt were unjust.
 
 00:07:21.990 --> 00:07:26.353
 So he single-handedly tries to raise the
 
 00:07:26.394 --> 00:07:28.696
 question of whether slaveholding itself in
 
 00:07:28.795 --> 00:07:29.656
 England is legal.
 
 00:07:30.658 --> 00:07:32.098
 Some folks will know about that as the
 
 00:07:32.158 --> 00:07:33.139
 Somerset case.
 
 00:07:33.860 --> 00:07:36.461
 And then he uses that platform then to
 
 00:07:36.562 --> 00:07:38.182
 raise the broader question of whether
 
 00:07:38.242 --> 00:07:39.584
 slavery in the British Empire,
 
 00:07:40.845 --> 00:07:41.805
 if not legal,
 
 00:07:43.848 --> 00:07:45.829
 Whether it's moral, whether it's ethical,
 
 00:07:45.889 --> 00:07:49.213
 whether it helps explain the problems that
 
 00:07:49.233 --> 00:07:51.675
 the empire was experiencing.
 
 00:07:51.757 --> 00:07:53.077
 So in some ways,
 
 00:07:54.019 --> 00:07:56.221
 the anti-slavery movement in England
 
 00:07:56.302 --> 00:07:57.423
 really begins with him.
 
 00:07:57.798 --> 00:07:59.259
 And the thing about Sharp is that he
 
 00:07:59.279 --> 00:08:00.141
 had no ego.
 
 00:08:01.482 --> 00:08:03.322
 He really had no interest in trying to
 
 00:08:03.343 --> 00:08:04.624
 draw attention to himself.
 
 00:08:04.644 --> 00:08:07.666
 He was not self-mythologizing in any way.
 
 00:08:09.048 --> 00:08:10.988
 It really was a kind of a deep
 
 00:08:11.149 --> 00:08:13.050
 sense of personal commitment for him.
 
 00:08:33.336 --> 00:08:34.758
 for historians to get at this,
 
 00:08:34.817 --> 00:08:37.559
 even the local nature of this.
 
 00:08:37.639 --> 00:08:38.200
 Yeah.
 
 00:08:38.320 --> 00:08:38.980
 And it's a really,
 
 00:08:39.041 --> 00:08:40.442
 it was a really interesting part of
 
 00:08:40.501 --> 00:08:41.942
 working on this book, Bob,
 
 00:08:41.962 --> 00:08:44.725
 because I don't myself come from a
 
 00:08:44.764 --> 00:08:45.926
 religious background.
 
 00:08:46.947 --> 00:08:48.587
 I don't, you know, I'm not,
 
 00:08:49.168 --> 00:08:51.530
 I had to learn a lot about evangelical
 
 00:08:51.571 --> 00:08:53.491
 Christianity to write about it.
 
 00:08:55.910 --> 00:08:57.493
 the commitment in some ways was to try
 
 00:08:57.533 --> 00:09:00.556
 to see the world through their eyes.
 
 00:09:01.235 --> 00:09:03.477
 And it became really clear pretty early,
 
 00:09:03.498 --> 00:09:04.919
 and I wasn't the first one to see
 
 00:09:04.960 --> 00:09:08.043
 this, that the purposes,
 
 00:09:08.903 --> 00:09:10.725
 it's not just that evangelicals had
 
 00:09:10.764 --> 00:09:11.985
 religious motivations,
 
 00:09:12.025 --> 00:09:13.447
 they had religious purposes.
 
 00:09:14.568 --> 00:09:17.831
 They really wanted to promote the
 
 00:09:17.871 --> 00:09:20.474
 conversion to Christianity.
 
 00:09:21.686 --> 00:09:22.886
 for enslaved Africans,
 
 00:09:22.927 --> 00:09:23.986
 and they thought slaveholders were
 
 00:09:24.006 --> 00:09:24.667
 standing in the way.
 
 00:09:24.687 --> 00:09:25.087
 Correctly,
 
 00:09:25.128 --> 00:09:26.368
 they thought slaveholders were standing in
 
 00:09:26.508 --> 00:09:27.869
 the way.
 
 00:09:27.969 --> 00:09:29.708
 And so, in a lot of ways,
 
 00:09:29.989 --> 00:09:33.270
 what antislavery meant to them was to
 
 00:09:33.350 --> 00:09:34.910
 make, you know,
 
 00:09:35.410 --> 00:09:38.373
 much more sincere Christians of both
 
 00:09:38.432 --> 00:09:41.453
 slaveholders and enslaved Africans.
 
 00:09:42.184 --> 00:09:44.868
 And so when you see their work as
 
 00:09:44.908 --> 00:09:47.770
 an attempt to sacralize and Christianize
 
 00:09:47.811 --> 00:09:48.451
 the world,
 
 00:09:50.052 --> 00:09:52.696
 then some of the choices they make make
 
 00:09:52.716 --> 00:09:53.537
 a lot more sense.
 
 00:10:23.350 --> 00:10:23.931
 otherwise.
 
 00:10:24.892 --> 00:10:26.653
 Yeah, I mean, well, I mean,
 
 00:10:26.673 --> 00:10:28.995
 you've done great work on Equiano as well,
 
 00:10:30.196 --> 00:10:33.018
 you know, which advertisement,
 
 00:10:33.038 --> 00:10:34.639
 which I've used in class many times.
 
 00:10:36.539 --> 00:10:37.941
 But that's true.
 
 00:10:39.822 --> 00:10:40.582
 You know, I,
 
 00:10:43.826 --> 00:10:46.086
 there's often been a need to try to
 
 00:10:46.768 --> 00:10:48.068
 squeeze Equiano into
 
 00:10:48.931 --> 00:10:53.052
 into the tradition of the African-American
 
 00:10:53.113 --> 00:10:54.673
 slave market.
 
 00:10:54.714 --> 00:10:54.953
 You know,
 
 00:10:55.254 --> 00:10:56.695
 he spent very little time in North
 
 00:10:56.735 --> 00:10:57.254
 America.
 
 00:10:58.475 --> 00:10:59.416
 He really, you know,
 
 00:10:59.436 --> 00:11:01.116
 obviously was publishing for a British
 
 00:11:01.297 --> 00:11:01.837
 audience.
 
 00:11:02.898 --> 00:11:05.078
 His narrative is so crucial to the early
 
 00:11:05.119 --> 00:11:06.879
 stages of the British anti-slavery
 
 00:11:06.940 --> 00:11:07.379
 movement.
 
 00:11:08.140 --> 00:11:10.042
 And, you know, as you know well,
 
 00:11:10.261 --> 00:11:14.063
 it's just chock full of the language of
 
 00:11:14.903 --> 00:11:17.586
 the kind of Protestant reawakening, right?
 
 00:11:18.386 --> 00:11:21.649
 It's both a conversion narrative and it's
 
 00:11:21.769 --> 00:11:23.910
 a confessional of a kind.
 
 00:11:23.951 --> 00:11:24.870
 Yeah, yeah.
 
 00:11:24.890 --> 00:11:26.753
 Because he's involved in the slave trade
 
 00:11:26.832 --> 00:11:29.495
 and in slavery after he becomes free.
 
 00:11:29.914 --> 00:11:31.115
 That's right, that's right.
 
 00:11:31.495 --> 00:11:32.135
 And again,
 
 00:11:32.155 --> 00:11:34.999
 it points out some of the ways that
 
 00:11:35.178 --> 00:11:37.019
 slaveholding and slave trading were so
 
 00:11:37.220 --> 00:11:41.923
 built deeply into the world that even
 
 00:11:41.964 --> 00:11:43.625
 those who had been victims of it
 
 00:11:44.875 --> 00:11:47.676
 could then become, later in their lives,
 
 00:11:47.755 --> 00:11:48.916
 participants in it.
 
 00:11:50.216 --> 00:11:51.076
 And then in some ways,
 
 00:11:51.216 --> 00:11:53.477
 one of the things that precipitates the
 
 00:11:53.538 --> 00:11:55.418
 narrative, the writing narrative,
 
 00:11:55.597 --> 00:11:57.818
 is the experience with the Sierra Leone
 
 00:11:57.879 --> 00:11:58.558
 expedition.
 
 00:11:59.038 --> 00:11:59.678
 That's right.
 
 00:12:00.559 --> 00:12:01.419
 Yeah, that's right.
 
 00:12:02.081 --> 00:12:05.102
 Yeah, I mean, so the, he,
 
 00:12:06.023 --> 00:12:07.962
 he's really right there at all of the
 
 00:12:08.043 --> 00:12:11.323
 decision points for the early, you know,
 
 00:12:11.364 --> 00:12:12.504
 for the early movement.
 
 00:12:12.583 --> 00:12:13.423
 I mean, he, you know,
 
 00:12:13.464 --> 00:12:16.865
 he visits Quaker meeting houses at a time
 
 00:12:16.884 --> 00:12:18.424
 when they are just starting as a,
 
 00:12:19.245 --> 00:12:22.426
 as a religious body with themselves and
 
 00:12:22.466 --> 00:12:24.086
 slaveholders and slave traders.
 
 00:12:24.106 --> 00:12:26.886
 And he is curious,
 
 00:12:27.006 --> 00:12:29.648
 he recruited at one point some of the
 
 00:12:29.668 --> 00:12:31.128
 earliest missionary
 
 00:12:32.303 --> 00:12:34.605
 opportunities in West Africa.
 
 00:12:34.645 --> 00:12:37.707
 Reports on the Zong case, you know.
 
 00:12:37.727 --> 00:12:41.409
 So he's really kind of there as the
 
 00:12:42.091 --> 00:12:46.374
 subject of the live political issue.
 
 00:12:46.474 --> 00:12:49.034
 It's interesting, speaking of West Africa,
 
 00:12:49.096 --> 00:12:51.096
 one of the characters that I had never
 
 00:12:51.116 --> 00:12:52.378
 heard of until reading your book is
 
 00:12:52.717 --> 00:12:54.078
 Malachi Postlefleet.
 
 00:12:54.278 --> 00:12:57.041
 Again,
 
 00:12:57.221 --> 00:12:59.682
 writing before the American Revolution,
 
 00:12:59.783 --> 00:13:00.283
 but his
 
 00:13:01.168 --> 00:13:03.692
 has very complicated reasons for
 
 00:13:03.711 --> 00:13:05.754
 denouncing the slave trade he's hoping
 
 00:13:05.774 --> 00:13:07.975
 like equiano also built on this let's have
 
 00:13:07.995 --> 00:13:10.198
 these commercial ties with africa that
 
 00:13:10.239 --> 00:13:12.221
 this will actually be more beneficial than
 
 00:13:12.260 --> 00:13:12.942
 slave trade so
 
 00:13:13.774 --> 00:13:15.735
 For those who might not have known about
 
 00:13:15.817 --> 00:13:17.116
 Malachi Postlethwaite.
 
 00:13:17.136 --> 00:13:18.759
 No one, yeah,
 
 00:13:19.678 --> 00:13:21.139
 I feel like I kind of, yeah,
 
 00:13:21.159 --> 00:13:22.100
 Malachi Postlethwaite.
 
 00:13:22.120 --> 00:13:23.261
 So it's a Welsh name.
 
 00:13:24.243 --> 00:13:27.404
 And he is a, he's a kind of,
 
 00:13:30.687 --> 00:13:34.190
 he's an insider in the Royal Africa
 
 00:13:34.230 --> 00:13:34.610
 Company.
 
 00:13:35.827 --> 00:13:38.009
 when the Royal Africa Company is an
 
 00:13:38.068 --> 00:13:40.049
 increasingly failing concern.
 
 00:13:40.831 --> 00:13:42.591
 The British slave trade is increasingly
 
 00:13:42.711 --> 00:13:44.091
 run over the course of the eighteenth
 
 00:13:44.131 --> 00:13:46.854
 century by independent merchants rather
 
 00:13:46.874 --> 00:13:48.934
 than these large corporate bodies.
 
 00:13:49.514 --> 00:13:51.355
 And Postlethwaite is one of the most
 
 00:13:51.436 --> 00:13:54.357
 dedicated figures in the Royal Africa
 
 00:13:54.378 --> 00:13:57.458
 Company as it approaches bankruptcy.
 
 00:13:57.980 --> 00:13:59.539
 And he's got this idea that the Royal
 
 00:13:59.600 --> 00:14:02.621
 Africa Company can be rescued if it finds
 
 00:14:02.682 --> 00:14:03.743
 a different niche
 
 00:14:04.850 --> 00:14:06.470
 in Britain's West Africa trades.
 
 00:14:07.030 --> 00:14:10.270
 And so he starts arguing that Britain
 
 00:14:10.311 --> 00:14:12.812
 should invest in essentially creating
 
 00:14:12.892 --> 00:14:16.852
 plantation-like economies in West Africa
 
 00:14:17.472 --> 00:14:18.774
 that would make the slave trade
 
 00:14:18.913 --> 00:14:20.214
 unnecessary because you wouldn't need it.
 
 00:14:20.474 --> 00:14:21.333
 You wouldn't need Barbados.
 
 00:14:21.354 --> 00:14:22.875
 You wouldn't need South Carolina.
 
 00:14:23.575 --> 00:14:26.475
 West Africans cultivated sugar and cotton
 
 00:14:26.515 --> 00:14:27.916
 and rice in the back of indigo.
 
 00:14:28.883 --> 00:14:30.443
 in Africa itself.
 
 00:14:30.923 --> 00:14:31.924
 And so he sees this as a kind
 
 00:14:31.965 --> 00:14:33.865
 of alternative to the Atlantic slave
 
 00:14:33.904 --> 00:14:34.245
 trade.
 
 00:14:35.525 --> 00:14:38.347
 And it's one of these ways that a
 
 00:14:38.447 --> 00:14:40.668
 case is made against the Atlantic slave
 
 00:14:40.708 --> 00:14:42.929
 trade, not on moral grounds,
 
 00:14:43.309 --> 00:14:45.130
 but on the grounds that it gets in
 
 00:14:45.171 --> 00:14:49.312
 the way of what's far more profitable.
 
 00:14:50.974 --> 00:14:54.916
 So it's kind of an early visionary for
 
 00:14:56.398 --> 00:14:58.119
 empire.
 
 00:14:58.198 --> 00:14:59.639
 The sorts of things that European
 
 00:14:59.679 --> 00:15:01.061
 governments do in the late-nineteenth,
 
 00:15:01.081 --> 00:15:03.582
 early-twentieth century of establishing
 
 00:15:03.623 --> 00:15:05.845
 imperial governments and extracting
 
 00:15:05.865 --> 00:15:08.365
 commodities and all of those kinds of
 
 00:15:08.405 --> 00:15:08.625
 things.
 
 00:15:08.807 --> 00:15:10.607
 Apostle Thwaites is dreaming of that in
 
 00:15:10.628 --> 00:15:12.109
 the middle of the eighteenth century,
 
 00:15:12.469 --> 00:15:14.629
 and he's dreaming about it as a way
 
 00:15:14.971 --> 00:15:18.393
 of providing an alternative to the
 
 00:15:18.432 --> 00:15:19.354
 Atlantic slave trade.
 
 00:15:19.374 --> 00:15:21.375
 So people could argue against the Atlantic
 
 00:15:21.394 --> 00:15:23.897
 slave trade on all kinds of grounds that
 
 00:15:23.937 --> 00:15:25.717
 were not primarily
 
 00:15:26.738 --> 00:15:27.879
 moral or ethical.
 
 00:15:28.019 --> 00:15:31.360
 I'm wondering, again,
 
 00:15:31.379 --> 00:15:33.321
 it's the question I always have with the
 
 00:15:33.461 --> 00:15:35.541
 later abolitionists in the nineteenth
 
 00:15:35.581 --> 00:15:36.121
 century,
 
 00:15:36.562 --> 00:15:38.402
 how do you convince people who are not
 
 00:15:38.422 --> 00:15:40.503
 themselves going to be slaves that slavery
 
 00:15:40.663 --> 00:15:41.503
 is wrong?
 
 00:15:41.844 --> 00:15:44.403
 And you show these different arguments
 
 00:15:44.423 --> 00:15:45.325
 that people are making,
 
 00:15:45.384 --> 00:15:48.725
 like Haaslethwait and someone like Maurice
 
 00:15:53.826 --> 00:15:57.647
 others who are making this argument for
 
 00:15:57.866 --> 00:15:59.187
 against the slave trade,
 
 00:15:59.226 --> 00:16:01.366
 but it's not necessarily because this is
 
 00:16:01.407 --> 00:16:03.087
 good for those who are enslaved.
 
 00:16:04.148 --> 00:16:08.129
 So one of the working questions for Moral
 
 00:16:08.168 --> 00:16:08.989
 Capital, Bob,
 
 00:16:09.028 --> 00:16:14.690
 was when men or women opposed slavery or
 
 00:16:14.730 --> 00:16:16.309
 the slave trade in Britain,
 
 00:16:17.250 --> 00:16:18.551
 what were they trying to do?
 
 00:16:18.571 --> 00:16:19.350
 Right.
 
 00:16:20.201 --> 00:16:25.692
 Because it's a mistake to assume that when
 
 00:16:25.751 --> 00:16:29.700
 people are pursuing agendas of this kind,
 
 00:16:31.259 --> 00:16:33.380
 that the only motivation or the only
 
 00:16:33.500 --> 00:16:36.061
 reason that they're drawn to it is because
 
 00:16:36.760 --> 00:16:39.422
 they have moral or ethical issues with
 
 00:16:39.481 --> 00:16:40.221
 slavery and the slave trade.
 
 00:16:40.241 --> 00:16:41.342
 I mean, that's there too,
 
 00:16:41.863 --> 00:16:44.543
 but often it's attached to some other
 
 00:16:44.604 --> 00:16:45.024
 purpose.
 
 00:16:45.043 --> 00:16:46.583
 So the evangelicals,
 
 00:16:46.663 --> 00:16:48.764
 it's about spreading Christianity.
 
 00:16:48.804 --> 00:16:49.764
 With Apostle Slade,
 
 00:16:49.784 --> 00:16:53.505
 it's about finding alternatives to the
 
 00:16:53.525 --> 00:16:55.125
 Atlantic slave trade that might be more
 
 00:16:55.166 --> 00:16:55.787
 profitable,
 
 00:16:55.807 --> 00:16:56.647
 that could rescue
 
 00:16:57.746 --> 00:17:00.188
 a failing corporation like the Royal
 
 00:17:00.269 --> 00:17:01.048
 Africa Company.
 
 00:17:01.548 --> 00:17:02.610
 For Morris Morgan,
 
 00:17:03.990 --> 00:17:08.073
 he's writing after Britain has acquired
 
 00:17:09.192 --> 00:17:11.294
 substantial new territories after the
 
 00:17:11.354 --> 00:17:12.214
 Seven Years' War,
 
 00:17:12.234 --> 00:17:13.615
 which Americans know as the French and
 
 00:17:13.635 --> 00:17:14.215
 Indian War.
 
 00:17:15.236 --> 00:17:18.817
 And he's looking at the problem of how
 
 00:17:18.837 --> 00:17:22.839
 does Britain extend its reach into the
 
 00:17:22.880 --> 00:17:25.162
 tropical world where
 
 00:17:26.084 --> 00:17:29.247
 Europeans have settled unsuccessfully
 
 00:17:29.406 --> 00:17:29.686
 often.
 
 00:17:29.767 --> 00:17:33.170
 The idea was that Europeans died in hot
 
 00:17:33.210 --> 00:17:33.851
 climates,
 
 00:17:33.931 --> 00:17:36.232
 that Africans were better suited for these
 
 00:17:36.272 --> 00:17:36.653
 places.
 
 00:17:36.673 --> 00:17:38.354
 That's part of the reason why slavery
 
 00:17:38.374 --> 00:17:39.315
 supposedly existed.
 
 00:17:39.875 --> 00:17:42.377
 So Morgan's idea was we can do two
 
 00:17:42.397 --> 00:17:43.117
 things at once.
 
 00:17:43.157 --> 00:17:47.521
 We can expand empire and undermine slavery
 
 00:17:48.282 --> 00:17:51.265
 if we turn blacks into essentially
 
 00:17:51.325 --> 00:17:53.146
 colonists for the British empire,
 
 00:17:53.948 --> 00:17:54.387
 liberate
 
 00:17:55.269 --> 00:17:56.991
 you know, arm them, you know,
 
 00:17:57.071 --> 00:17:59.474
 give all the rights of colonial subjects
 
 00:17:59.954 --> 00:18:02.057
 and let them push into what we now
 
 00:18:02.097 --> 00:18:04.580
 think of as the deep south, you know,
 
 00:18:04.601 --> 00:18:06.663
 the sort of the Gulf Coast, you know,
 
 00:18:06.782 --> 00:18:09.145
 extend the reach into, you know,
 
 00:18:09.185 --> 00:18:11.347
 modern day Texas or other parts of the
 
 00:18:11.387 --> 00:18:12.028
 Caribbean, right?
 
 00:18:12.048 --> 00:18:13.230
 So the idea was to...
 
 00:18:13.931 --> 00:18:15.051
 emancipate, yes,
 
 00:18:15.112 --> 00:18:18.234
 but emancipate with the idea of expanding
 
 00:18:18.275 --> 00:18:21.297
 the empire into places where European
 
 00:18:21.356 --> 00:18:22.938
 settlers have been hesitant to go.
 
 00:18:23.038 --> 00:18:23.999
 So, you know,
 
 00:18:24.118 --> 00:18:26.681
 anti-slavery could serve imperial purposes
 
 00:18:26.861 --> 00:18:29.423
 as well as undermine them.
 
 00:18:29.503 --> 00:18:29.624
 Right.
 
 00:18:29.723 --> 00:18:31.045
 And sometimes we look at that,
 
 00:18:31.125 --> 00:18:32.405
 and here they'll be contesting with the
 
 00:18:32.445 --> 00:18:34.166
 French and the Spanish empires,
 
 00:18:34.247 --> 00:18:35.788
 but we look at that and then denigrate
 
 00:18:36.288 --> 00:18:37.869
 their cause itself, the reason itself,
 
 00:18:37.890 --> 00:18:39.351
 because they're doing this not for the
 
 00:18:39.411 --> 00:18:41.032
 moral reasons we would prefer,
 
 00:18:41.093 --> 00:18:42.134
 but for the reasons
 
 00:18:43.305 --> 00:18:46.646
 they have.
 
 00:18:46.666 --> 00:18:46.807
 Yeah.
 
 00:18:46.987 --> 00:18:47.146
 I mean,
 
 00:18:47.467 --> 00:18:49.228
 I'm one of these people who I'm not
 
 00:18:49.268 --> 00:18:51.189
 sure there's ever such thing as a purely
 
 00:18:51.308 --> 00:18:53.450
 moral or ethical act,
 
 00:18:53.529 --> 00:18:55.250
 especially when you're talking about
 
 00:18:55.750 --> 00:18:57.873
 things that are beyond the interpersonal.
 
 00:19:00.034 --> 00:19:02.434
 And one of the other sort of broader
 
 00:19:02.494 --> 00:19:06.257
 points that became very important in the
 
 00:19:06.317 --> 00:19:09.318
 book is to show some of the ways
 
 00:19:09.358 --> 00:19:09.659
 that
 
 00:19:10.432 --> 00:19:12.955
 know when people take action that we
 
 00:19:13.477 --> 00:19:17.422
 understand to be moral and ethical it's in
 
 00:19:17.481 --> 00:19:20.705
 part because how you see yourself
 
 00:19:21.586 --> 00:19:24.349
 individually and collectively is an
 
 00:19:24.390 --> 00:19:25.811
 important part of
 
 00:19:26.657 --> 00:19:28.279
 you know, how people live in the world.
 
 00:19:28.599 --> 00:19:29.740
 And that's not a bad thing.
 
 00:19:29.800 --> 00:19:29.980
 I mean,
 
 00:19:30.020 --> 00:19:32.544
 wanting to feel better about yourself can
 
 00:19:32.584 --> 00:19:33.865
 lead to all sorts of good,
 
 00:19:34.065 --> 00:19:35.566
 can lead to all sorts of good,
 
 00:19:36.227 --> 00:19:37.127
 you know, actions.
 
 00:19:37.587 --> 00:19:39.109
 But it's important to recognize that
 
 00:19:39.130 --> 00:19:41.071
 there's a self-reflective part of it,
 
 00:19:41.372 --> 00:19:42.712
 self-reflective part of it,
 
 00:19:43.134 --> 00:19:45.836
 is that it feels good to do good.
 
 00:19:45.855 --> 00:19:47.257
 That's right, yeah.
 
 00:19:47.978 --> 00:19:49.019
 That is one of the critical,
 
 00:19:49.058 --> 00:19:51.181
 we are really venturing into the realm now
 
 00:19:51.221 --> 00:19:52.001
 of theology
 
 00:20:02.342 --> 00:20:04.804
 What does that empire mean?
 
 00:20:04.903 --> 00:20:05.704
 Yeah, that's right.
 
 00:20:07.626 --> 00:20:09.929
 It's weird because to write about the
 
 00:20:09.989 --> 00:20:12.550
 history of moral experience and ethical
 
 00:20:12.810 --> 00:20:13.451
 experience,
 
 00:20:14.051 --> 00:20:17.776
 how people wrestle with the notions of
 
 00:20:17.935 --> 00:20:20.818
 right and wrong in their own lives in
 
 00:20:20.858 --> 00:20:21.578
 the past,
 
 00:20:22.319 --> 00:20:24.162
 it's not about trying to make judgments.
 
 00:20:24.182 --> 00:20:26.022
 It's about trying to understand
 
 00:20:27.269 --> 00:20:30.211
 how people in real time make the judgments
 
 00:20:30.231 --> 00:20:31.492
 and choices that they make.
 
 00:20:33.015 --> 00:20:34.635
 We're talking with Christopher Leslie
 
 00:20:34.675 --> 00:20:35.016
 Brown,
 
 00:20:35.036 --> 00:20:37.077
 who is a professor of history at Columbia
 
 00:20:37.157 --> 00:20:37.817
 University,
 
 00:20:37.877 --> 00:20:40.440
 where he's for about twenty years and
 
 00:20:40.640 --> 00:20:42.761
 author of Moral Capital Foundations of
 
 00:20:42.801 --> 00:20:43.982
 British abolitionism.
 
 00:20:44.002 --> 00:20:45.223
 And
 
 00:21:12.869 --> 00:21:14.471
 what's happening is far important.
 
 00:21:14.490 --> 00:21:15.672
 Why isn't it?
 
 00:21:16.211 --> 00:21:16.451
 Yeah,
 
 00:21:16.471 --> 00:21:18.232
 so this is the group of Anglican
 
 00:21:18.313 --> 00:21:19.153
 evangelicals.
 
 00:21:19.173 --> 00:21:20.914
 The person who's most well known,
 
 00:21:21.394 --> 00:21:23.156
 of course, is William Wilberforce.
 
 00:21:23.717 --> 00:21:30.260
 But Wilberforce's politics and purpose was
 
 00:21:30.402 --> 00:21:34.403
 nurtured in a circle of pretty elite and
 
 00:21:34.523 --> 00:21:35.585
 well-placed,
 
 00:21:36.184 --> 00:21:38.106
 devout men and women who
 
 00:21:39.932 --> 00:21:41.893
 in the years after the American Revolution
 
 00:21:41.972 --> 00:21:45.953
 decided that modernizing Britain was
 
 00:21:46.013 --> 00:21:47.413
 becoming too secular,
 
 00:21:48.233 --> 00:21:52.256
 that the church was more concerned with
 
 00:21:52.476 --> 00:21:55.615
 its institutional power rather than really
 
 00:21:56.297 --> 00:22:00.817
 encouraging a sense of devotion to the
 
 00:22:00.877 --> 00:22:01.117
 faith.
 
 00:22:01.417 --> 00:22:03.778
 Too much of religion had become very rote,
 
 00:22:04.699 --> 00:22:06.660
 habitual without having the kind of the
 
 00:22:06.680 --> 00:22:07.619
 real substance to it.
 
 00:22:08.259 --> 00:22:09.461
 And Hannah Moore is one of these people
 
 00:22:09.480 --> 00:22:16.146
 who had been a real celebrated poet and
 
 00:22:18.088 --> 00:22:19.289
 writer for the theater.
 
 00:22:19.609 --> 00:22:22.732
 She was a kind of a literary phenomenon.
 
 00:22:22.992 --> 00:22:25.055
 And she has this kind of awake, like,
 
 00:22:25.075 --> 00:22:26.476
 there's got to be more to life than
 
 00:22:26.516 --> 00:22:26.796
 this.
 
 00:22:27.916 --> 00:22:30.298
 And she's part of this group that's
 
 00:22:30.378 --> 00:22:31.701
 looking for ways to
 
 00:22:32.864 --> 00:22:36.765
 bring religion into the public square in a
 
 00:22:36.845 --> 00:22:38.325
 way that's not off-putting.
 
 00:22:39.766 --> 00:22:43.506
 And this group at Barham Court kind of
 
 00:22:44.507 --> 00:22:48.807
 recognizes that opposing slavery can be a
 
 00:22:49.008 --> 00:22:53.429
 way of doing something that
 
 00:22:54.767 --> 00:22:58.548
 looks and is moral and is concerned with
 
 00:22:59.089 --> 00:23:00.810
 rights and liberty and justice,
 
 00:23:01.451 --> 00:23:03.952
 but can also sort of teach people the
 
 00:23:04.032 --> 00:23:08.836
 value of pursuing religious ends in
 
 00:23:08.875 --> 00:23:10.957
 addition to, you know, the sordid,
 
 00:23:12.077 --> 00:23:14.259
 you know, money getting or, you know,
 
 00:23:14.278 --> 00:23:15.960
 the sort of the, you know,
 
 00:23:16.000 --> 00:23:17.621
 going to the theater or reading novels,
 
 00:23:17.661 --> 00:23:18.402
 those kinds of things.
 
 00:23:18.942 --> 00:23:21.263
 They have this idea that
 
 00:23:22.326 --> 00:23:24.931
 They can merge evangelicalism and the
 
 00:23:24.971 --> 00:23:27.773
 pursuit of liberty into one purpose,
 
 00:23:27.834 --> 00:23:29.797
 and they see anti-slavery as a way of
 
 00:23:29.856 --> 00:23:30.397
 doing that.
 
 00:23:30.817 --> 00:23:32.099
 And they're very self-conscious about
 
 00:23:32.119 --> 00:23:32.259
 this.
 
 00:23:32.279 --> 00:23:32.401
 I mean,
 
 00:23:32.421 --> 00:23:33.761
 this notion that they're going to be the
 
 00:23:33.801 --> 00:23:34.763
 running meat of the Negroes,
 
 00:23:34.784 --> 00:23:36.065
 that it's sort of the grand charter of
 
 00:23:36.145 --> 00:23:36.685
 African liberty.
 
 00:23:36.705 --> 00:23:36.846
 Right.
 
 00:23:37.267 --> 00:23:39.048
 is going to be written in this little
 
 00:23:39.087 --> 00:23:39.988
 village in Kent.
 
 00:23:40.407 --> 00:23:42.169
 I mean, it's very self-conscious.
 
 00:23:42.348 --> 00:23:42.528
 I mean,
 
 00:23:42.548 --> 00:23:44.329
 they really think we're going to do great
 
 00:23:44.349 --> 00:23:46.349
 things and everybody's going to know us
 
 00:23:46.390 --> 00:23:47.911
 for the great things that we did and
 
 00:23:47.931 --> 00:23:50.192
 we're going to show Christ's action in the
 
 00:23:50.211 --> 00:23:50.491
 world.
 
 00:23:50.511 --> 00:23:51.112
 I mean, they're very,
 
 00:23:51.172 --> 00:23:52.752
 very self-aware about this.
 
 00:23:53.173 --> 00:23:53.792
 So in some ways,
 
 00:23:53.833 --> 00:23:55.574
 they couldn't be more thrilled that,
 
 00:23:55.634 --> 00:23:55.933
 in fact,
 
 00:23:55.973 --> 00:23:57.815
 they end up getting remembered that way a
 
 00:23:57.875 --> 00:23:58.855
 century and a half later.
 
 00:24:00.215 --> 00:24:02.057
 The story that they want to tell about
 
 00:24:02.096 --> 00:24:03.978
 themselves becomes a story that's told
 
 00:24:04.077 --> 00:24:09.181
 about them for many generations on.
 
 00:24:09.421 --> 00:24:13.163
 Are there any black people at the court
 
 00:24:13.262 --> 00:24:14.084
 as part of this?
 
 00:24:14.523 --> 00:24:17.945
 Yeah, not really.
 
 00:24:17.965 --> 00:24:19.487
 This is something that I really want to
 
 00:24:19.606 --> 00:24:24.730
 emphasize that the moral capital and many
 
 00:24:24.769 --> 00:24:26.270
 studies of the British anti-slavery
 
 00:24:26.310 --> 00:24:27.531
 movement more generally,
 
 00:24:29.531 --> 00:24:31.192
 have a very specific task,
 
 00:24:31.633 --> 00:24:34.574
 which is to try to make sense of,
 
 00:24:34.594 --> 00:24:36.575
 to put it in the crudest possible terms,
 
 00:24:37.994 --> 00:24:40.395
 why white people in Britain decided that
 
 00:24:40.455 --> 00:24:42.435
 black people in the colonies were worth
 
 00:24:42.476 --> 00:24:43.217
 worrying about.
 
 00:24:44.896 --> 00:24:48.057
 There's a whole broader issue about the
 
 00:24:48.137 --> 00:24:50.298
 opposition to slavery and the slave trade
 
 00:24:51.023 --> 00:24:53.006
 which comes from enslaved Africans or free
 
 00:24:53.026 --> 00:24:54.386
 Black people in the empire.
 
 00:24:54.446 --> 00:24:56.749
 So this is actually a very narrow,
 
 00:24:58.529 --> 00:24:59.490
 incredibly important,
 
 00:24:59.510 --> 00:25:01.553
 but narrow aspect of a much broader
 
 00:25:01.653 --> 00:25:02.113
 subject.
 
 00:25:03.775 --> 00:25:05.895
 And for the most part,
 
 00:25:06.537 --> 00:25:09.019
 the British abolitionists tend not to be
 
 00:25:09.078 --> 00:25:11.800
 especially concerned about what Black
 
 00:25:11.840 --> 00:25:13.222
 people want for themselves.
 
 00:25:13.863 --> 00:25:14.083
 Right.
 
 00:25:14.323 --> 00:25:15.703
 They have an idea of, you know,
 
 00:25:16.704 --> 00:25:19.106
 of a kind of an emancipatory politics that
 
 00:25:19.146 --> 00:25:22.128
 will also serve their notion of what free
 
 00:25:22.169 --> 00:25:23.210
 people should do,
 
 00:25:24.250 --> 00:25:25.692
 which includes a certain kind of
 
 00:25:26.492 --> 00:25:27.173
 gratitude.
 
 00:25:27.192 --> 00:25:29.515
 You know, almost many,
 
 00:25:29.615 --> 00:25:33.337
 many wealthy families had
 
 00:25:36.603 --> 00:25:37.782
 black servants,
 
 00:25:37.803 --> 00:25:39.324
 some of whom were kind of free or
 
 00:25:39.403 --> 00:25:40.384
 sort of enslaved.
 
 00:25:40.744 --> 00:25:42.866
 It wasn't unusual to see black people in
 
 00:25:42.926 --> 00:25:43.247
 England.
 
 00:25:43.807 --> 00:25:45.008
 I don't know off the top of my
 
 00:25:45.127 --> 00:25:46.930
 head whether Wilbur Forrest, Adam Moore,
 
 00:25:46.950 --> 00:25:50.531
 some of those folks had black essentially
 
 00:25:50.612 --> 00:25:52.353
 servants slash slaves.
 
 00:25:53.253 --> 00:25:54.674
 I don't think that group did.
 
 00:25:55.972 --> 00:25:56.834
 But it certainly would not have been
 
 00:25:56.874 --> 00:25:57.894
 uncommon in their world.
 
 00:25:58.694 --> 00:25:59.155
 Interesting.
 
 00:25:59.175 --> 00:26:02.518
 Another of the characters or the figures,
 
 00:26:02.597 --> 00:26:03.659
 and this is James Ramsey,
 
 00:26:03.679 --> 00:26:06.580
 who does have a background in the West
 
 00:26:06.661 --> 00:26:06.941
 Indies.
 
 00:26:06.980 --> 00:26:08.122
 Can you tell us a little bit about
 
 00:26:08.182 --> 00:26:08.342
 him?
 
 00:26:08.882 --> 00:26:09.262
 Yeah,
 
 00:26:09.462 --> 00:26:11.784
 so he ends up being a major figure
 
 00:26:12.904 --> 00:26:14.605
 in Moral Capital.
 
 00:26:18.000 --> 00:26:20.201
 I believe at the early stages is no
 
 00:26:20.261 --> 00:26:23.163
 less important than Thomas Clarkson and
 
 00:26:23.263 --> 00:26:26.385
 one before us and Olaudah Equiano and some
 
 00:26:26.425 --> 00:26:30.108
 of the other folks who, you know,
 
 00:26:30.128 --> 00:26:31.890
 people today might be more familiar with.
 
 00:26:31.910 --> 00:26:32.089
 So, I mean,
 
 00:26:33.330 --> 00:26:36.192
 he's kind of the eighteenth century
 
 00:26:36.251 --> 00:26:38.513
 version of a whistleblower in the sense
 
 00:26:38.554 --> 00:26:39.233
 that he, you know,
 
 00:26:39.253 --> 00:26:41.115
 he resided in the British Caribbean
 
 00:26:42.757 --> 00:26:44.798
 uh you know more than two decades he
 
 00:26:45.278 --> 00:26:48.182
 he served as a doctor and a clergyman
 
 00:26:48.701 --> 00:26:52.305
 he was himself a slave owner um and
 
 00:26:52.566 --> 00:26:52.786
 he
 
 00:26:55.450 --> 00:26:58.971
 really came to the view that his peers
 
 00:26:59.151 --> 00:27:01.571
 were completely morally bankrupt,
 
 00:27:02.913 --> 00:27:08.414
 that there was a way to practice slavery,
 
 00:27:08.434 --> 00:27:10.556
 to put it in twentieth century terms,
 
 00:27:10.576 --> 00:27:12.016
 that was kinder and gentler,
 
 00:27:13.297 --> 00:27:16.817
 that there's no reason why slave owners
 
 00:27:16.857 --> 00:27:18.838
 could not take more interest in the
 
 00:27:19.378 --> 00:27:23.180
 spiritual and other welfare of the people
 
 00:27:23.220 --> 00:27:24.201
 that they owned.
 
 00:27:24.941 --> 00:27:27.823
 And so he really sort of pushed for
 
 00:27:27.923 --> 00:27:30.084
 many years, living in the Caribbean,
 
 00:27:30.163 --> 00:27:31.884
 of let's just try to make this a
 
 00:27:31.944 --> 00:27:32.765
 gentler system.
 
 00:27:32.805 --> 00:27:34.486
 Let's just ameliorate slavery a little
 
 00:27:34.526 --> 00:27:34.605
 bit.
 
 00:27:34.645 --> 00:27:37.027
 What if we just recognize that these
 
 00:27:37.047 --> 00:27:39.028
 people ought to have basic human rights,
 
 00:27:39.108 --> 00:27:40.088
 even if we own them?
 
 00:27:40.449 --> 00:27:40.628
 Like,
 
 00:27:40.949 --> 00:27:43.030
 does this not look like an anti-slavery
 
 00:27:43.070 --> 00:27:43.451
 position
 
 00:27:44.718 --> 00:27:45.578
 at our time at all.
 
 00:27:45.598 --> 00:27:47.380
 And it wasn't an anti-slavery position,
 
 00:27:47.400 --> 00:27:50.102
 but it was a slavery-critical position.
 
 00:27:50.721 --> 00:27:55.365
 And as he became more and more frustrated
 
 00:27:55.384 --> 00:27:56.145
 with his peers,
 
 00:27:56.326 --> 00:27:58.567
 he got more and more radicalized.
 
 00:28:00.048 --> 00:28:03.711
 And he began to see it as symptomatic
 
 00:28:03.790 --> 00:28:05.372
 of a broader problem of the British
 
 00:28:05.432 --> 00:28:05.952
 Empire,
 
 00:28:06.452 --> 00:28:11.056
 in which colonial elites took no interest
 
 00:28:11.476 --> 00:28:12.936
 in anything besides
 
 00:28:15.198 --> 00:28:16.659
 profits and enriching themselves.
 
 00:28:17.578 --> 00:28:21.060
 And so it turned him into an advocate
 
 00:28:21.101 --> 00:28:23.761
 for much broader kinds of imperial
 
 00:28:23.821 --> 00:28:24.442
 reforms,
 
 00:28:25.002 --> 00:28:29.003
 one of which for him was ameliorating
 
 00:28:29.044 --> 00:28:29.503
 slavery.
 
 00:28:30.585 --> 00:28:31.984
 And so he's the kind of bridge to
 
 00:28:32.005 --> 00:28:33.945
 people like Hannah Moore and Wilberforce
 
 00:28:33.986 --> 00:28:35.027
 of sort of saying, hey,
 
 00:28:35.047 --> 00:28:37.867
 this is a system which is
 
 00:28:39.231 --> 00:28:42.178
 so beyond the pale morally and ethically
 
 00:28:42.919 --> 00:28:44.501
 that it's really deserving of reform.
 
 00:29:08.355 --> 00:29:10.218
 something that gives them a consistency.
 
 00:29:10.238 --> 00:29:11.358
 And it's really important, Bob.
 
 00:29:11.398 --> 00:29:13.020
 It's not that they're insincere.
 
 00:29:14.222 --> 00:29:16.905
 It's not that they don't mean what they
 
 00:29:17.026 --> 00:29:17.405
 say.
 
 00:29:18.086 --> 00:29:20.109
 I mean, they are genuinely troubled.
 
 00:29:21.892 --> 00:29:22.913
 by slaveholding,
 
 00:29:22.952 --> 00:29:24.653
 and they're especially troubled by slave
 
 00:29:24.673 --> 00:29:25.074
 trading.
 
 00:29:25.733 --> 00:29:27.654
 I mean, they're really hostile to it.
 
 00:29:28.435 --> 00:29:30.777
 But they're hostile to it as part of
 
 00:29:30.817 --> 00:29:32.877
 a broader set of things that they're
 
 00:29:32.938 --> 00:29:34.138
 concerned about.
 
 00:29:34.179 --> 00:29:35.819
 Sometimes it says, like,
 
 00:29:35.839 --> 00:29:37.060
 there was a way of writing about
 
 00:29:37.141 --> 00:29:39.362
 abolitionists as if they woke up in the
 
 00:29:39.402 --> 00:29:40.722
 morning and they were abolitionists,
 
 00:29:40.742 --> 00:29:41.903
 and they were abolitionists through
 
 00:29:41.942 --> 00:29:43.763
 breakfast and lunch and the whole day,
 
 00:29:44.144 --> 00:29:45.525
 and they went to bed as abolitionists
 
 00:29:45.545 --> 00:29:46.865
 without taking into account
 
 00:29:47.388 --> 00:29:49.009
 all the other things that matter to them.
 
 00:29:49.029 --> 00:29:50.309
 And if you want to make sense of
 
 00:29:50.349 --> 00:29:52.111
 why people do what they do,
 
 00:29:53.632 --> 00:29:56.472
 you want to know how their political
 
 00:29:56.532 --> 00:29:57.973
 priorities relate to their other
 
 00:29:58.013 --> 00:29:58.554
 priorities,
 
 00:29:59.295 --> 00:30:00.634
 some of which are very personal,
 
 00:30:00.654 --> 00:30:01.875
 some of which are interpersonal,
 
 00:30:02.336 --> 00:30:04.676
 some of which are even subconscious.
 
 00:30:05.738 --> 00:30:09.239
 And explaining the choices people make
 
 00:30:09.539 --> 00:30:11.580
 means taking on board all those different
 
 00:30:11.961 --> 00:30:12.901
 sets of concerns.
 
 00:30:21.730 --> 00:30:22.952
 write the narrative.
 
 00:30:22.992 --> 00:30:23.614
 That's right.
 
 00:30:23.733 --> 00:30:24.194
 That's right.
 
 00:30:24.255 --> 00:30:24.836
 And, you know,
 
 00:30:25.156 --> 00:30:27.701
 I am doing this kind of work.
 
 00:30:27.760 --> 00:30:28.383
 You are
 
 00:30:29.747 --> 00:30:32.829
 it's interpretive yeah you have you know
 
 00:30:32.890 --> 00:30:35.030
 and you as you know you you're going
 
 00:30:35.070 --> 00:30:37.472
 through every single shred of document
 
 00:30:37.573 --> 00:30:40.756
 evidence all different kinds of materials
 
 00:30:40.776 --> 00:30:43.337
 to try to figure out in this case
 
 00:30:43.357 --> 00:30:45.159
 what was going on with these people yeah
 
 00:30:45.440 --> 00:30:46.701
 um you know and i feel like i've
 
 00:30:46.740 --> 00:30:47.942
 got a pretty good i got a pretty
 
 00:30:47.961 --> 00:30:49.323
 good read on them but i would not
 
 00:30:49.383 --> 00:30:51.564
 be surprised and in fact i would be
 
 00:30:51.704 --> 00:30:53.945
 pleased folks come behind me and sort of
 
 00:30:53.965 --> 00:30:54.487
 say you know what
 
 00:30:56.678 --> 00:30:57.939
 you said about hannah moore okay but i
 
 00:30:57.959 --> 00:30:59.119
 think there's something else that's going
 
 00:30:59.140 --> 00:31:01.803
 on there with her yeah um so it's
 
 00:31:01.903 --> 00:31:04.005
 always a process of discovery and
 
 00:31:04.045 --> 00:31:07.027
 interpretation it really is we're talking
 
 00:31:07.047 --> 00:31:09.048
 with christopher leslie brown professor of
 
 00:31:09.068 --> 00:31:10.891
 history at columbia and author of moral
 
 00:31:10.931 --> 00:31:13.093
 capital foundations of british
 
 00:31:13.212 --> 00:31:16.996
 abolitionism and another another of the
 
 00:31:17.056 --> 00:31:19.038
 pieces that is really fascinating here is
 
 00:31:19.357 --> 00:31:22.240
 when we here in um the united states
 
 00:31:28.782 --> 00:31:31.644
 India, Barbados, but Senegambia,
 
 00:31:32.003 --> 00:31:34.125
 as you call it,
 
 00:31:34.224 --> 00:31:36.625
 it's a place up the Senegal River,
 
 00:31:36.726 --> 00:31:39.287
 and that also figures naturally in this
 
 00:31:39.307 --> 00:31:39.666
 story.
 
 00:31:42.953 --> 00:31:44.835
 I don't think there was a greater
 
 00:31:44.875 --> 00:31:46.275
 surprise, Bob,
 
 00:31:46.535 --> 00:31:52.257
 than when I started seeing references in
 
 00:31:52.277 --> 00:31:55.817
 the records to the British province of
 
 00:31:55.877 --> 00:31:56.518
 Senegambia.
 
 00:31:59.038 --> 00:32:01.640
 it was one of these things where i
 
 00:32:01.980 --> 00:32:03.421
 i came across it because i was looking
 
 00:32:03.480 --> 00:32:04.861
 i was interested in the beginnings of
 
 00:32:04.941 --> 00:32:07.321
 sierra leone right now which is the
 
 00:32:08.083 --> 00:32:11.064
 combination of a refuge sanctuary for
 
 00:32:11.163 --> 00:32:14.285
 former slaves um you know left with the
 
 00:32:14.325 --> 00:32:16.066
 british during the american revolution
 
 00:32:16.125 --> 00:32:17.346
 it's also supposed to be a kind of
 
 00:32:17.365 --> 00:32:21.067
 a demonstration colony in a way for um
 
 00:32:21.107 --> 00:32:22.929
 a british beachhead in west africa that
 
 00:32:22.949 --> 00:32:24.608
 would be a kind of site for fighting
 
 00:32:24.648 --> 00:32:25.950
 the atlantic slave trade so it's all of
 
 00:32:25.970 --> 00:32:26.170
 those
 
 00:32:26.750 --> 00:32:27.471
 different things.
 
 00:32:27.510 --> 00:32:29.011
 And as I was going through this early
 
 00:32:29.051 --> 00:32:29.972
 Sierra Leone stuff,
 
 00:32:30.012 --> 00:32:31.335
 I kept seeing these references to the
 
 00:32:31.375 --> 00:32:32.596
 province of Senegambia.
 
 00:32:33.997 --> 00:32:35.959
 And there is no such a thing.
 
 00:32:37.961 --> 00:32:40.423
 And you go into the secondary literature
 
 00:32:40.482 --> 00:32:41.703
 as it existed at the time,
 
 00:32:43.025 --> 00:32:44.747
 and there was literally no reference to
 
 00:32:44.826 --> 00:32:44.886
 it.
 
 00:32:46.040 --> 00:32:47.241
 Pushed back a little further,
 
 00:32:47.382 --> 00:32:49.323
 the scholarship from the nineteen teens,
 
 00:32:49.403 --> 00:32:50.242
 nineteen twenties,
 
 00:32:50.303 --> 00:32:52.824
 nineteen thirties had some passing
 
 00:32:52.864 --> 00:32:54.345
 references, some pages to it.
 
 00:32:55.204 --> 00:32:55.846
 So, I mean,
 
 00:32:55.905 --> 00:32:59.146
 it turned out that Britain established a
 
 00:32:59.186 --> 00:33:03.028
 colonial project in West Africa in the
 
 00:33:03.088 --> 00:33:04.930
 seventeen sixties, seventeen seventies.
 
 00:33:06.106 --> 00:33:08.028
 nobody knew anything about yeah i mean
 
 00:33:08.048 --> 00:33:09.470
 it's actually pretty amazing in the late
 
 00:33:09.509 --> 00:33:11.310
 twentieth century to discover a colonial
 
 00:33:11.351 --> 00:33:12.771
 project that nobody never heard of it's
 
 00:33:12.791 --> 00:33:16.453
 amazing and you know it was one of
 
 00:33:16.515 --> 00:33:19.155
 these things where i started to dig into
 
 00:33:19.195 --> 00:33:22.459
 a little bit and this is much bigger
 
 00:33:22.499 --> 00:33:24.319
 than anything that i can deal with right
 
 00:33:24.380 --> 00:33:27.362
 now but it was but it clearly had
 
 00:33:27.442 --> 00:33:30.765
 some relationship to this broader issue of
 
 00:33:31.909 --> 00:33:34.471
 different kinds of commercial and imperial
 
 00:33:34.550 --> 00:33:39.753
 ambitions in West Africa that were related
 
 00:33:39.794 --> 00:33:41.816
 in some ways to anti-slavery thought.
 
 00:33:42.256 --> 00:33:43.557
 So I needed to deal with it from
 
 00:33:43.596 --> 00:33:46.939
 that point of view.
 
 00:33:47.720 --> 00:33:48.220
 But yeah, I mean,
 
 00:33:48.259 --> 00:33:49.480
 so I've actually been spending a fair
 
 00:33:49.500 --> 00:33:51.561
 amount of time over the years
 
 00:33:52.594 --> 00:33:54.194
 building out an understanding of the
 
 00:33:54.234 --> 00:33:56.816
 province of Senegal because it's a it's a
 
 00:33:56.855 --> 00:34:00.277
 colonial project that not only was
 
 00:34:00.317 --> 00:34:03.397
 forgotten by historians but it was almost
 
 00:34:03.518 --> 00:34:06.499
 immediately forgotten at the time so you
 
 00:34:06.558 --> 00:34:08.739
 go through so it's the basic story is
 
 00:34:08.780 --> 00:34:11.061
 that it's created in the aftermath of the
 
 00:34:11.101 --> 00:34:14.061
 seven years war to try to control access
 
 00:34:14.081 --> 00:34:16.061
 to certain kinds of commercial markets
 
 00:34:16.161 --> 00:34:17.623
 especially to keep France out
 
 00:34:18.583 --> 00:34:20.585
 It's a province colony only in Maine.
 
 00:34:20.605 --> 00:34:21.927
 There's never more than a few dozen
 
 00:34:21.967 --> 00:34:23.547
 British people there at any given time.
 
 00:34:24.128 --> 00:34:26.411
 It's a casualty of the American Revolution
 
 00:34:26.451 --> 00:34:29.893
 because France returns to the region after
 
 00:34:29.914 --> 00:34:32.936
 it enters the war with the British and
 
 00:34:32.956 --> 00:34:35.139
 destroys the remnants of it.
 
 00:34:35.960 --> 00:34:37.862
 And this is the part that's amazing about
 
 00:34:37.922 --> 00:34:38.021
 it.
 
 00:34:38.523 --> 00:34:39.643
 Within a decade,
 
 00:34:40.936 --> 00:34:42.637
 There is no reference in Britain.
 
 00:34:42.677 --> 00:34:47.097
 It's as if it never existed.
 
 00:34:47.157 --> 00:34:48.079
 And as you know well,
 
 00:34:48.639 --> 00:34:50.480
 there are mountains and mountains of
 
 00:34:50.619 --> 00:34:52.800
 information testimony collected about
 
 00:34:52.940 --> 00:34:54.541
 Britain's trade in Africa and the slave
 
 00:34:54.561 --> 00:34:55.902
 trade and all of that.
 
 00:34:56.902 --> 00:34:59.702
 No one ever acknowledges that this thing
 
 00:34:59.923 --> 00:35:00.724
 ever existed.
 
 00:35:02.222 --> 00:35:05.182
 And so there's an interesting story there
 
 00:35:05.262 --> 00:35:08.605
 about a collective national forgetting of
 
 00:35:08.664 --> 00:35:10.786
 what's essentially a kind of a disaster of
 
 00:35:11.045 --> 00:35:14.228
 an imperial experiment that everyone
 
 00:35:14.268 --> 00:35:16.489
 involved decides it's just worth not
 
 00:35:16.528 --> 00:35:17.168
 talking about.
 
 00:35:18.489 --> 00:35:20.070
 So, yeah.
 
 00:35:20.311 --> 00:35:23.172
 So it's a really strange moment in British
 
 00:35:23.211 --> 00:35:23.652
 imperial history.
 
 00:35:23.672 --> 00:35:24.472
 Your book opens up.
 
 00:35:32.228 --> 00:35:33.668
 i don't know about i don't know about
 
 00:35:33.728 --> 00:35:35.170
 movies but there are a lot of there
 
 00:35:35.210 --> 00:35:38.492
 are a lot of threads that that i
 
 00:35:38.512 --> 00:35:40.373
 that i i would have liked to pursue
 
 00:35:40.653 --> 00:35:43.436
 but you know it's a long book i
 
 00:35:43.456 --> 00:35:44.836
 don't think anybody wants a five hundred
 
 00:35:44.876 --> 00:35:47.599
 page book to be any longer um but
 
 00:35:47.619 --> 00:35:49.199
 there's a lot of things that i i
 
 00:35:51.014 --> 00:35:52.414
 I opened up that I didn't get a
 
 00:35:52.474 --> 00:35:53.655
 chance to address in the way that I
 
 00:35:53.695 --> 00:35:54.235
 might have liked.
 
 00:35:54.856 --> 00:35:55.956
 It's one of the great things about a
 
 00:35:55.976 --> 00:35:57.436
 book like this is it opens up lots
 
 00:35:57.496 --> 00:35:59.358
 of things that then someone else can pick
 
 00:35:59.438 --> 00:36:00.039
 up.
 
 00:36:00.079 --> 00:36:01.119
 That's what you hope for.
 
 00:36:01.358 --> 00:36:02.880
 Yeah.
 
 00:36:17.737 --> 00:36:18.378
 Yeah, I mean,
 
 00:36:19.780 --> 00:36:24.224
 I think Clarkson shows another aspect
 
 00:36:24.525 --> 00:36:27.807
 about how social movements begin,
 
 00:36:27.827 --> 00:36:29.309
 and that was really one of my driving
 
 00:36:29.349 --> 00:36:29.969
 concerns,
 
 00:36:30.371 --> 00:36:33.474
 was trying to understand how do
 
 00:36:33.554 --> 00:36:34.233
 successful,
 
 00:36:34.295 --> 00:36:36.797
 powerful social movements get their start.
 
 00:36:37.777 --> 00:36:39.880
 I think it's very easy to assume that
 
 00:36:39.940 --> 00:36:40.701
 people will
 
 00:36:42.068 --> 00:36:42.307
 You know,
 
 00:36:42.947 --> 00:36:45.668
 that starting a powerful political,
 
 00:36:46.048 --> 00:36:47.170
 anybody who tries to do the work as
 
 00:36:47.190 --> 00:36:48.849
 an activist knows how difficult it is.
 
 00:36:49.751 --> 00:36:51.630
 But they so rarely succeed in the way
 
 00:36:51.650 --> 00:36:53.612
 that the British antislavery movement did
 
 00:36:53.652 --> 00:36:55.873
 in terms of its political influence and
 
 00:36:55.913 --> 00:36:58.074
 popular reach that understanding how they,
 
 00:36:58.934 --> 00:36:59.193
 you know,
 
 00:36:59.534 --> 00:37:01.755
 how it originates is not only about trying
 
 00:37:01.795 --> 00:37:03.956
 to understand the making of the modern
 
 00:37:03.996 --> 00:37:05.036
 world, the fall of slavery,
 
 00:37:05.056 --> 00:37:06.597
 but also just trying to understand sort of
 
 00:37:07.318 --> 00:37:08.538
 a kind of a certain kind of dynamic
 
 00:37:08.577 --> 00:37:09.478
 and political history.
 
 00:37:09.498 --> 00:37:14.161
 And Clarkson is that guy who's that young
 
 00:37:14.221 --> 00:37:15.942
 man in a hurry who, you know,
 
 00:37:17.722 --> 00:37:18.983
 it was a real discovery.
 
 00:37:19.063 --> 00:37:20.664
 One of the many discoveries I had was
 
 00:37:20.724 --> 00:37:23.284
 realizing that so many of the key figures
 
 00:37:23.985 --> 00:37:27.246
 were young men in their early twenties who
 
 00:37:27.347 --> 00:37:27.626
 were
 
 00:37:28.690 --> 00:37:30.371
 and being young in the early twenties and
 
 00:37:30.391 --> 00:37:31.751
 the eighteenth century and the
 
 00:37:31.952 --> 00:37:33.413
 twenty-first century are not the same
 
 00:37:33.452 --> 00:37:36.195
 thing, but who saw,
 
 00:37:38.235 --> 00:37:40.056
 who had a kind of an idea for
 
 00:37:40.097 --> 00:37:43.059
 the person they wanted to be and the
 
 00:37:43.139 --> 00:37:44.940
 world that they wanted to make,
 
 00:37:46.280 --> 00:37:50.043
 and saw anti-slavery as this kind of
 
 00:37:50.222 --> 00:37:52.284
 mission for themselves that they thought
 
 00:37:52.364 --> 00:37:53.704
 could be a life mission.
 
 00:37:55.068 --> 00:37:57.550
 And so Clarkson throws himself into it in
 
 00:37:57.590 --> 00:37:59.971
 a way of a kind of person who
 
 00:38:00.050 --> 00:38:03.132
 is ambitious for his goal,
 
 00:38:03.152 --> 00:38:05.253
 but also ambitious for himself.
 
 00:38:06.273 --> 00:38:06.853
 And, you know,
 
 00:38:06.913 --> 00:38:08.853
 Wilberforce is similar in some ways.
 
 00:38:08.893 --> 00:38:10.635
 Even Hannah Moore is similar in some ways.
 
 00:38:10.655 --> 00:38:14.675
 These are young folks who really see,
 
 00:38:15.715 --> 00:38:16.016
 like,
 
 00:38:16.036 --> 00:38:17.916
 who just are imagining a kind of a
 
 00:38:17.996 --> 00:38:21.057
 transformation that's national,
 
 00:38:21.097 --> 00:38:21.777
 that's imperial,
 
 00:38:21.797 --> 00:38:23.259
 that's also deeply personal.
 
 00:38:24.556 --> 00:38:26.056
 And so I do think that that's an
 
 00:38:26.076 --> 00:38:26.817
 important way,
 
 00:38:26.836 --> 00:38:28.677
 a part of understanding where movements
 
 00:38:28.737 --> 00:38:31.476
 come from, some of that youthful energy.
 
 00:38:31.617 --> 00:38:33.018
 And Clarkson is, you know,
 
 00:38:33.038 --> 00:38:34.737
 essentially one of the first professional
 
 00:38:34.838 --> 00:38:35.237
 activists.
 
 00:38:35.257 --> 00:38:36.898
 I mean, he spends his entire life,
 
 00:38:37.498 --> 00:38:37.858
 you know,
 
 00:38:38.219 --> 00:38:40.438
 pushing anti-slavery causes until his,
 
 00:38:41.039 --> 00:38:43.519
 you know, death, you know,
 
 00:38:43.619 --> 00:38:45.460
 I guess in his mid-seventies,
 
 00:38:45.500 --> 00:38:46.099
 late seventies.
 
 00:38:46.119 --> 00:38:46.239
 I mean,
 
 00:38:46.260 --> 00:38:47.701
 he's a professional abolitionist his
 
 00:38:47.740 --> 00:38:48.481
 entire life.
 
 00:38:49.641 --> 00:38:51.362
 He's the exception to what I said about
 
 00:38:51.382 --> 00:38:52.402
 waking up and going to bed.
 
 00:38:52.483 --> 00:38:52.682
 I mean,
 
 00:38:52.744 --> 00:38:55.344
 he is an abolitionist every hour of his
 
 00:38:55.385 --> 00:38:56.306
 life, basically.
 
 00:38:57.626 --> 00:38:59.668
 So, yeah, it's a really interesting,
 
 00:38:59.688 --> 00:39:00.909
 he's an interesting story.
 
 00:39:00.929 --> 00:39:01.248
 Yeah.
 
 00:39:01.268 --> 00:39:05.672
 And your book has a lot of really
 
 00:39:05.711 --> 00:39:06.452
 interesting stories.
 
 00:39:12.141 --> 00:39:14.081
 the foundations of British abolitionism.
 
 00:39:14.503 --> 00:39:15.802
 So thanks so much for joining us.
 
 00:39:15.902 --> 00:39:16.583
 It's great, Bob.
 
 00:39:16.623 --> 00:39:18.063
 It's wonderful to be a part of this.
 
 00:39:18.123 --> 00:39:19.523
 And thank you for having me.
 
 00:39:19.963 --> 00:39:20.403
 My pleasure.
 
 00:39:20.423 --> 00:39:22.003
 And I want to thank Jonathan Lane,
 
 00:39:22.023 --> 00:39:23.804
 our producer, the man behind the curtain.
 
 00:39:23.824 --> 00:39:24.405
 And every week,
 
 00:39:24.425 --> 00:39:26.405
 we thank folks who are regular listeners.
 
 00:39:26.505 --> 00:39:27.846
 And if you're in one of these places
 
 00:39:27.885 --> 00:39:29.746
 and want some of our Revolution Two-Fifty
 
 00:39:29.786 --> 00:39:31.786
 swag, send Jonathan an email,
 
 00:39:31.806 --> 00:39:33.806
 jlane at revolutiontwofivo.org.
 
 00:39:34.626 --> 00:39:35.847
 And if you're not in one of these
 
 00:39:35.887 --> 00:39:37.168
 places and want to connect with
 
 00:39:37.208 --> 00:39:37.668
 Jonathan's,
 
 00:39:41.239 --> 00:39:41.958
 And this week,
 
 00:39:41.978 --> 00:39:44.079
 I want to thank our listeners in the
 
 00:39:44.119 --> 00:39:46.181
 great state of New Hampshire, in Warner,
 
 00:39:46.260 --> 00:39:48.501
 Manchester, and Lebanon, and Bangor,
 
 00:39:48.541 --> 00:39:50.643
 Maine, Tallahassee, Florida, Meridian,
 
 00:39:50.742 --> 00:39:52.804
 Idaho, Springfield, New Jersey,
 
 00:39:52.864 --> 00:39:54.505
 and Springfield, Massachusetts,
 
 00:39:54.565 --> 00:39:57.065
 and also in New Jersey, Wayne, Hillsboro,
 
 00:39:57.106 --> 00:39:59.067
 and East Brunswick, as well as Brunswick,
 
 00:40:04.001 --> 00:40:06.643
 Nairobi, Doha, Madrid, Singapore,
 
 00:40:06.664 --> 00:40:10.188
 Montreal, Barcelona, Erfurt and Thuringia.
 
 00:40:10.208 --> 00:40:11.929
 When you were talking about kind of
 
 00:40:11.949 --> 00:40:12.909
 reformation themes,
 
 00:40:12.949 --> 00:40:14.632
 I thought about our listeners in Erfurt.
 
 00:40:14.652 --> 00:40:14.871
 I love it.
 
 00:40:14.891 --> 00:40:15.813
 I love it.
 
 00:40:16.653 --> 00:40:18.675
 London and Tel Aviv and Ponte,
 
 00:40:18.695 --> 00:40:20.938
 Wales and Sydney and New South Wales.
 
 00:40:20.978 --> 00:40:21.918
 Thank you all for joining us.