A virtual fellow's forum with Kenneth Morgan, Professor of History in the Department of Politics and History at Brunel University, London from April 26, 2022. Recording available.
Recorded Program
In his upcoming book, Proscription by Degrees: The Abolition of the Slave Trade to the United States, Kenneth Morgan seeks to explain the economic, social, political, and pragmatic steps that eventually led to the Congressional abolition of the slave trade in 1808, the first year that such an action was made possible according to Article 1, Section 9 of the United States Constitution. Morgan’s talk has two parts, first he will explain why there was a variegated response to the abolition of the slave trade in individual states, using South Carolina as an example, explaining why they were the most recalcitrant state in terms of proscribing slave imports, but also why its position changed in 1806-7. Finally, he will appraise the actions of various anti-slave trade initiatives in the three decades leading up to 1808 and to assess the extent to which the United States slave trade abolition in 1808 can be viewed as a successful outcome of anti-slave trade pressure.
About the Speaker
Kenneth Morgan was educated at the University of Leicester; New College, Oxford; King’s College, Cambridge; and the University of Pennsylvania. He is Professor of History in the Department of Politics and History at Brunel University London, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His publications cover British imperial history, Australian history, and music history. Among his books are Bristol and the Atlantic Trade in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1993); Slavery, Atlantic Trade and the British Economy, 1660-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2000, with John J. McCusker),The Early Modern Atlantic Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2000); Slavery and Servitude in Colonial North America (New York University Press, 2000); Fritz Reiner: Maestro & Martinet (University of Illinois Press, 2005); Slavery and the British Empire: From Africa to America (Oxford University Press, 2007); The Bright-Meyler Papers: A Bristol-West India Connection,1732-1837 (Oxford University Press, 2007); Australia: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2012); Australia Circumnavigated: the Journals of Matthew Flinders in H.M.S. Investigator, 1801-1803, 2 vols. (Routledge for the Hakluyt Society, 2015); A Short History of Transatlantic Slavery (I. B. Tauris, 2016); Matthew Flinders, Maritime Explorer of Australia (Bloomsbury, 2016); and Navigating under the Southern Cross: The European Discovery of Australia (Bloomsbury, 2021).