This book examines the practice of arming slaves from ancient times to the modern era, analyzing why slaveholders entrusted slaves with military roles and how this practice affected the institution of slavery. It covers examples from the ancient Mediterranean, early Islamic states, Africa, South America, the Caribbean, and the U.S. Civil War.
Christopher Leslie Brown's *Moral Capital* explores the emergence of the British abolitionist movement by examining the impact of the American Revolution and changing views of empire and nation. The book highlights how abolitionism became a moral cause that benefited both the abolitionists and the enslaved, challenging traditional narratives of humanitarianism and economic determinism.
In this book, William MacAskill advocates for longtermism, the idea that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority. He argues that future people count, there could be many of them, and we can make their lives better. MacAskill discusses various threats to humanity, including climate change, AI misalignment, and pandemics, and proposes strategies to ensure civilization's survival and improve its trajectory. The book explores moral and philosophical issues surrounding longtermism, including the risks of human extinction, civilizational collapse, and technological stagnation, while offering a measured optimism about the future's potential for human flourishing[1][5][4].
In this seminal work, Eric Williams contends that slavery played a crucial role in the rise of capitalism and the British Empire. He argues that the wealth generated from the slave trade and slavery fueled British industrial development, and that racism was a consequence of slavery rather than its cause. The book refutes traditional ideas of economic and moral progress, emphasizing the economic motivations behind the abolition of slavery and highlighting the agency of the enslaved in their own liberation. Williams's study is based on extensive historical research, including parliamentary debates, merchants’ papers, and abolitionist documents, and has had a profound impact on the scholarship of slavery and capitalism[1][4][5].
In many ways, humanity seems to have become more humane and inclusive over time. While there’s still a lot of progress to be made, campaigns to give people of different genders, races, sexualities, ethnicities, beliefs, and abilities equal treatment and rights have had significant success.
It’s tempting to believe this was inevitable — that the arc of history “bends toward justice,” and that as humans get richer, we’ll make even more moral progress.
But today's guest Christopher Brown — a professor of history at Columbia University and specialist in the abolitionist movement and the British Empire during the 18th and 19th centuries — believes the story of how slavery became unacceptable suggests moral progress is far from inevitable.
Links to learn more, video, highlights, and full transcript.
While most of us today feel that the abolition of slavery was sure to happen sooner or later as humans became richer and more educated, Christopher doesn't believe any of the arguments for that conclusion pass muster. If he's right, a counterfactual history where slavery remains widespread in 2023 isn't so far-fetched.
As Christopher lays out in his two key books, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism and Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age, slavery has been ubiquitous throughout history. Slavery of some form was fundamental in Classical Greece, the Roman Empire, in much of the Islamic civilization, in South Asia, and in parts of early modern East Asia, Korea, China.
It was justified on all sorts of grounds that sound mad to us today. But according to Christopher, while there’s evidence that slavery was questioned in many of these civilisations, and periodically attacked by slaves themselves, there was no enduring or successful moral advocacy against slavery until the British abolitionist movement of the 1700s.
That movement first conquered Britain and its empire, then eventually the whole world. But the fact that there's only a single time in history that a persistent effort to ban slavery got off the ground is a big clue that opposition to slavery was a contingent matter: if abolition had been inevitable, we’d expect to see multiple independent abolitionist movements thoroughly history, providing redundancy should any one of them fail.
Christopher argues that this rarity is primarily down to the enormous economic and cultural incentives to deny the moral repugnancy of slavery, and crush opposition to it with violence wherever necessary.
Mere awareness is insufficient to guarantee a movement will arise to fix a problem. Humanity continues to allow many severe injustices to persist, despite being aware of them. So why is it so hard to imagine we might have done the same with forced labour?
In this episode, Christopher describes the unique and peculiar set of political, social and religious circumstances that gave rise to the only successful and lasting anti-slavery movement in human history. These circumstances were sufficiently improbable that Christopher believes there are very nearby worlds where abolitionism might never have taken off.
We also discuss:
- Various instantiations of slavery throughout human history
- Signs of antislavery sentiment before the 17th century
- The role of the Quakers in early British abolitionist movement
- The importance of individual “heroes” in the abolitionist movement
- Arguments against the idea that the abolition of slavery was contingent
- Whether there have ever been any major moral shifts that were inevitable
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Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Milo McGuire
Transcriptions: Katy Moore
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