#111 Dr. Lewis Eliot: Slavery; Rebellion; and Racial Consciousness

Dr. Lewis Eliot is a professor of History at the University of South Carolina. His research explores the intersection of anti-slavery and imperialism during the nineteenth century. Dr. Eliot's dissertation, Rebellion and Empire in Britain’s Atlantic World, 1807-1884, analyzes how enslaved uprisings and the British Empire’s response to them created a new strain of abolitionism. This new form of anti-slavery touted racial hierarchies and British authorities forced this ideology upon rivals in Europe, Latin America, and Africa in order to maintain white supremacy while the bonds of slavery loosened. His research has been funded by the John Carter Brown Library, American Historical Association, Library Company of Philadelphia, Gilder Lehrman Institute, Walker Institute, and the University of South Carolina’s History Department, Graduate School, and Office of the Vice-President for Research. In the 2019-2020 academic year he was a Bridge Humanities Corps Fellow. He is the author of several articles including, “We Don’t Recognize Your Freedom: Slavery, Imperialism, and Statelessness in the Nineteenth Century Atlantic World” recently published in Atlantic Studies and "Exultations, Agonies, and Love: The Romantics and the Haitian Revolution". In this episode we explore how racism as it is experienced today has been constantly developing for the past 400 years and is a direct product of colonialism and imperialism. We explore how the Haitian Revolution affected the very nature of abolitionism in Western thought, ultimately instilling the race-based white supremacy that continues to this day. You can check out the latter article here: https://activisthistory.com/2017/07/07/exultations-agonies-and-love-the-romantics-and-the-haitian-revolution/ #haitianrevolution #history #haiti