Join us on Thursday, April 17, 2025, at 9:00 AM for Coffee With the Curator at the Museum of World Treasures!

In this session, Dr Lewis Eliot will discuss competing definitions of freedom in the twilight years of British slavery.

Event Details

• Date: Thursday, May 15, 2025
• Time: 9:00 AM
• Location: Museum of World Treasures [Get Directions]

Cost

• Museum Members: Free
• Non-Members: $4 per person plus tax

Become a Museum Member

Attending Information

• Open to all ages
• No need to register; simply walk in!
• Light refreshments provided.

Talk Summary

The concept of anti-slavery in Britain matured in the late eighteenth century from a radical fantasy into a legitimate political position. With that came an intense debate over the place of Black people in imperial society should slavery be abolished. Yet this discourse rarely if ever included Black people and certainly never engaged with the enslaved. But those enslaved people in fact had their own ideas about their place in a non-slaveholding British Empire. This talk examines these two divergent expectations of a post-emancipation British empire.

Speaker Bio - Dr. Lewis Eliot

Dr. Lewis Eliot is an assistant professor of British Imperial History at the University of Oklahoma, where he has worked since 2021. Before that, he completed his PhD at the University of South Carolina, MA at Queen’s University, Belfast, and BA at the School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London, his hometown. Dr. Eliot was raised by a single mother from Cape Town, South Africa and grew up in Brixton, an area of London home to a large community of Caribbean emigrants. These twin experiences led to a fascination with the place of non-white imperial subjects in the structures of the British Empire. The talk today is taken from his book, Languages of Liberty: Black Radical Revolution and Diplomatic Abolitionism in Britain’s Atlantic World, which is forthcoming with the University of California Press.