Canada's ties to slavery will be made clear in Harvard professor's lecture at A&S for Black History month

Canada’s little-known ties to the brutal slave trade that bankrolled the British Empire are made clear by award-winning author Professor Vincent Brown of Harvard University, who will deliver a free online public lecture February 3 in celebration of Black History Month.

“There were people enslaved in Canada because slavery was legal in the British Empire until 1838,” says Brown, whose lecture about the Jamaican Coromantee War of 1760–1761 will be based on his book Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War.

While Canada’s trading economy did not require much enslaved African labour, Admiral Charles Holmes — one of the top British commanders fighting in Quebec against France during The Seven Years War — later commanded the Royal Navy forces that supressed the Jamaican slave revolt, Brown notes.

This Faculty of Arts & Science inaugural decanal lecture is free and registration is available online. There will be an opportunity to ask questions, which you can submit in advance when you register. Please email spo.artsci@utoronto.ca for more information.

Brown is remarkable for his ability to connect the present and past, says Professor Melanie Newton of U of T’s Department of History in the Faculty of Arts & Science, who will facilitate questions at the lecture.

Understanding those connections is all the more relevant with the current devastating impact of COVID-19 and police violence on Black communities in Canada and around the world.

“I think what we’re seeing in his new book is that connection between these 18th century struggles against slavery and modern struggles against structures of inequality that cost people their lives,” says Newton.

While Brown shines light on a brutally suppressed revolt which eventually paved the road to abolition of slavery in the British Empire, he says there is a broader theme that may surprise the audience at his lecture.

“The thing that's going to be most memorable is my characterization of slavery itself as a state of war,” says Brown.

“Part of the problem is people think racism is a matter of personal animus, as opposed to something that's a legacy of the way these colonial societies were established. And you don't just suddenly end all of the consequences of conquest and domination when slavery is abolished.”