A Complex Truth: Professor Christopher Brown's Circle Talk on the Long History of the Atlantic Slave Trade

The dots on the map moved slowly and sparsely at first, traveling from east to west across the Atlantic from Africa to the New World. 

As time passed, the dots increased in number and speed, until they seemed to make a bridge across the ocean. This was the path of the Atlantic slave trade: An estimated 36,000 voyages, carrying 12.5 million captured in West Africa into bondage in the Americas, 2 million of whom died en route.

Forty years ago, such a graphic would’ve been impossible to create. As historian and Columbia University Professor Christopher Brown explained during a Circle Talk for the Groton School community on Tuesday, January 10, it’s difficult to exaggerate how little historians knew of the slave trade up until only recently. Because when it comes to slavery, there’s no archive, no central depository of facts at which to go study. Instead, Brown said, the true story of slavery and its impact on our world is hidden in fragments scattered across four continents. And it’s still being uncovered.

“What you’re looking at,” Brown said while pointing to the map projected on the back of the Campbell Performing Arts Center stage, “is the fruit of a collaboration among scholars that over forty years has recovered most of the history of the Atlantic slave trade by identifying these dots, by counting these ships, by going over every bit of information to yield the graphic behind me. This is living history. Ten years from now, what scholars know about this history will be different than what they know today.”

Brown’s current research centers on the history of European experience on the African coast at the height of the Atlantic slave trade. His published work has received prizes in four fields of study—American history, British history, Atlantic history, and the history of slavery, abolition, and resistance—including Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (University of North Carolina Press) and, with Philip D. Morgan, Arming Slaves: Classical Times to the Modern Age (Yale University Press).

Too often, when the slave trade and its legacy is discussed, Brown said, it’s reduced to gross oversimplification. In 2007, when the Brooklyn Nets were negotiating naming rights for a new basketball arena with the British bank Barclays, critics pointed to the enormous blood profits the Barclays family made during the slave trade as an affront to New York’s Black community, while the bank issued a firm denial, citing David Barclays’ abolitionism.

To Brown, it’s an old game that pits embarrassment and shame against exoneration, with little interest in the messy middle: “Good history rarely makes for a good press release.”

“In the 19th century there was no such thing as a bank that did not profit from slavery in one form or another,” said Brown. “We can reject the past. We can avert our eyes. But it doesn’t change the legacy that comes down to us.”

That legacy runs through every foundation of the world we’ve inherited, Brown said, from the Renaissance through Reformation and Enlightenment to the Industrial Revolution. “They were all entangled with slavery and the slave trade. It shaped them and was shaped by them.”

Yet dealing with this new understanding has been difficult for many. Beginning with Ruth Simmons’ groundbreaking 2006 Slavery and Justice report at Brown University, dozens of U.S. colleges have commissioned examinations of their history with human bondage, often drawing substantial backlash from alumni who would much rather leave the past in the past.

“It reminds me of something my eighth-grade son says when we want him to do something he doesn’t want to do,” said Brown. “‘We’re just not going to talk about that,’ he likes to say. And it has all the maturity of that, doesn’t it?”

Since the 1990s, Brown said, new strategies and research have shifted the focus of his field to subjects like gender and slavery, the human consequences of losing your identity and homes, and the trauma associated with watching your family die in front of you.

“Why don’t we all sit on a boat a quarter of the size of this room for the next five months and see how we’re doing after that,” Brown said.

The scope of this research is growing as well.

“It’s becoming clear that slavery and the slave trade are not just the special possession of African-Americans,” Brown said. “It’s not just a story for the thirteen colonies. It’s a story for all of the Americas, from Boston to Rio de Janeiro and the thousands of miles in between.

“Slavery influenced everything, from morals to literature to culture and clothing. Nothing, no one, escaped. This is not a parochial subject but part of the story of the making of the modern world.”

Brown closed his talk with a recollection of a 2007 trip he made to Ghana for a conference marking the abolition of the slave trade. He’d never been to Africa and was excited to go and meet fellow scholars from all over the world. “I was there to learn,” he said, “but I was also there to experience.”

“Everyone that I’m descended from has been in North America for at least ten generations. If I’m not an American, I don’t know who is,” Brown explained. “But when I stepped off the plane, I said, ‘Wow, I’m in Africa,’ and thought how that doesn’t sound like me. Then, while walking through the airport, I saw an attendant who looked like my cousin. My taxi driver sounded like my uncle. I started to make emotional connections I’d been dismissing because I was a scholar.

“It’s cliche for African-American tourists to visit these slave castles on the coast, to see the doors of no return, to revisit a past that has been lost. I cared deeply about these things but I wasn’t especially interested in the mystical aspects. But looking out over the Atlantic, knowing what began in the dungeons below, I wasn’t exactly crying, but it wasn’t terribly dignified either.

“I had been studying this subject for twenty years and teaching for a decade,” Brown continued. “I thought it knew what I was talking about. But standing there, I realized that I didn’t know anything, that what I was saying did not capture this. It’s humbling.”

The morning after his Circle Talk, Brown met with two groups of students in the Sackett Forum, answering questions (“They were unbelievable,” he said later.) and hearing them expand on their feelings toward the lecture and slavery.

He’s hopeful that, despite oversimplified political pushback to things like Critical Race Theory, this generation has an appetite for knowing more of the truth, in all its complexities. 

“It is a difficult subject, but it’s actually not as difficult as people make it out to be, and I think that’s part of the message,” Brown explained on his way to lunch before a flight back home. “When the subject is no longer who’s bad and who’s good, the nature of the discussion changes. 

“I think that today’s students are ready. I really do.”