John Harpham on the Intellectual Origins of American Slavery

Yascha Mounk and John Harpham examine how early modern thinkers justified slavery long before modern theories of race took hold.

John Samuel Harpham is Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics and Letters and Wick Cary Assistant Professor at the Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and John Harpham discuss why the standard racial account of slavery’s origins misses the earliest justifications for the practice, how Aristotelian and Roman conceptions of freedom and slavery shaped the intellectual world of the first English colonists, and what this history means for our understanding of slavery today.

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Podcast production by Jack Shields and Leonora Barclay.

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