Christopher Brown is a Professor in the Department of History at Columbia University. He is a historian of Britain and the British empire, principally in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with special emphasis on the comparative history of slavery and abolition, and with secondary interests in the Atlantic Slave Trade and the Age of Revolutions. His current research centers on the history of European experience on the African coast at the height of the Atlantic slave trade and continues early commitments to the rise and fall of slavery in the British Empire. His published work includes Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (University of North Carolina Press, 2006) and, with Philip D. Morgan, Arming Slaves: Classical Times to the Modern Age (Yale University Press, 2006). He has also written for The Nation, The New York Times, and the London Review of Books, among other outlets.
This Sawyer Seminar is funded by the Mellon Foundation.