Ben’s Book Club: ‘Slave Empire’ by Padraic X. Scanlan

Wednesday February 23 2022, 5pm GMT/12pm ET. Register here.  

Join us for the February instalment of Ben’s Book Club, a quarterly virtual gathering looking at themes relating to Benjamin Franklin, the 18th century, and American history.  

This month we will be talking to Padraic X. Scanlan about his book ‘Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain,’ which puts enslaved people at the centre the British empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 

In intimate, human detail, the chapters show how British imperial power and industrial capitalism were inextricable from plantation slavery. With vivid original research and careful synthesis of innovative historical scholarship, Slave Empire shows that British freedom and British slavery were made together. 

Dr Padraic X. Scanlan is Assistant Professor in the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources and the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto and a Research Associate at the Joint Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge. He has also held appointments at the London School of Economics and Harvard University. 

Buy your copy of ‘Slave Empire’ here. 

Join us even if you don’t have a chance to read the book by the event date!  

This event is free of charge but please consider making an online donation here to support the work of Benjamin Franklin House.