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Podcast: Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast
Episode: Ryan Hanley, "Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing, c. 1770 -1830" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
Description: To our eyes, eighteenth-century Britain can look like a world of opposites. On one hand everything was new: political parties and a ‘prime’ minister emerged in parliament; their sometime unruly debates were recorded by an expanding political press, whose products were read and debated in London’s many coffee houses. The Enlightenment began in Scotland, and unleashed new ideas about natural law, natural rights, and the perfectibility of society that drove the great democratic revolutions.On the other hand, the eighteenth century was defined by the survival of the old. For some historians, power continued to be channe...