2min chapter

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

80,000 Hours Podcast

CHAPTER

Slavery in the British West Indies

The loss of North America says that in one way or another, as a pollster say today, the empire was on the wrong track. And some of those interpreted that as we need to look at this question of the slave trade and of slavery in the British West Indies. It kind of created a space for folks who already had reservations to pose questions that had not really been posed before.

00:00
Speaker 2
It sounds like, yeah, for me, the language that Virginia couldn't be put back in the bottle, it sounds like you think that maybe a very difficult filter to pass that was passed by that point was that multiple different very influential groups in society had found for some decades that it was into their benefit to say that slavery was awful and that the other guys are at fault and that that really had changed attitudes more broadly, that the promulgation of that message by powerful people for so
Speaker 1
long. It's very hard to document, but in the immediate aftermath of the American of the American War for Independence, there is a brief but profound couple of years where a reflection on what went wrong is just circulating among the British elite. And there is a sense that the loss of North America says that in one way or another, as a pollster say today, the empire was on the wrong track, right? That there was just a kind of a, it was an indication that there were either in terms of governance or in terms of orientation or in terms of execution, that the overseas colonies were vulnerable. And some of those interpreted that as we need to look at this question of the slave trade and of slavery in the British West Indies, that was not the majority opinion by any means, but it kind of created a space for folks who already had reservations to pose questions that had not really been posed before.

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