Thoughtlines: academic thinking outside the box
Series 1 | Episode 6: Bronwen Everill – We are what we buy
In this episode we join the dots on the global story of abolition with Dr Bronwen Everill, 1973 lecturer in History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Why was the Cambridge connection so central to those campaigning to end the slave trade in Britain? What did these abolitionists have in common with those in West Africa and in the United States? What was the product that both drove slavery and helped early ethical consumers do their bit for the abolitionist cause? And how do we acknowledge the different types of ‘labour’ that make an academic life possible today?
- Presented by broadcast journalist Catherine Galloway and produced by Carl Homer of Cambridge TV.
- Thoughtlines is available via most podcast platforms.
Learn more:
- Bronwen Everill’s book Not Made By Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition is available in all good bookshops.
- Hear Bronwen Everill talking further about the Zong massacre on BBC Radio 4 – In Our Time, The Zong Massacre.
- Read Bronwen Everill’s blog article about buying ethically, and its limitations ‘Shopping for Racial Justice‘ and her research during her CRASSH fellowship: a journal article in History of Science on Freetown, Sierra Leone, as a ship-building and repair hub in the nineteenth century and an African Economic History working paper on measuring the standard of living in nineteenth-century Freetown
- The plaque to Anna Maria Vassa, discussed at the beginning of this episode, can be found at St Andrew’s Church, Chesterton, Cambridge.
- See also St Andrew’s Church, Chesterton’s Wikipedia entry which discusses the plaque.
