Adam Smith's 'The Wealth of Nations' and Atlantic Slavery Studies
Dr Stephen Mullen asks what role did Adam Smith play in the intellectual history of Atlantic slavery studies and what it means now.
Date: Monday 30 November 2026
Time: 18:30 - 20:00
Venue: Lecture Theatre 2, Boyd Orr Building, University Avenue, Glasgow, G12 8SP
Category: Public lectures, Social events, Academic events, Alumni events,
Dr Stephen Mullen asks what role did Adam Smith play in the intellectual history of Atlantic slavery studies and what it means now.
As principal researcher on the landmark 2018 report Slavery, Abolition and the University of Glasgow — which led to the University becoming the first in Britain to acknowledge financial income derived from slavery — and as author of the 2022 audit Glasgow, Slavery and Atlantic Commerce, commissioned by Glasgow City Council, Stephen Mullen has been a driving force behind a transformation in how this city reckons with its imperial past. In this lecture, Mullen asks what role did Adam Smith play in the intellectual history of Atlantic slavery studies, and what does that mean for how we understand slavery's legacies now? Smith's critique of slavery in The Wealth of Nations in 1776 entered the intellectual bloodstream of the abolitionist movement and shaped how reformers made the case for emancipation in the decades that followed. Yet Smith himself remained embedded in the social world of the merchants whose system he was dismantling, and his arguments had limits that his contemporaries and successors were forced to push beyond. Drawing on his research into Scotland's commercial entanglement with slavery, Mullen asks what it means today to take 'Adam Smith questions' seriously in Atlantic slavery studies — and what the unfinished work of reckoning with that history requires of us today.
Speakers
Dr Stephen Mullen
Stephen Mullen is alumnus of the Universities of Strathclyde and Glasgow, completing a PhD at the latter institution in 2015. This doctoral thesis examined Scotland’s relationship with Atlantic slavery from c.1775 until emancipation in the British West Indies,1834/8. The main focus was Glasgow’s West India merchants and planters, assessing how slavery-derived merchant and sojourning capital reshaped Scotland. He undertook extended research trips to Caribbean islands Jamaica, Grenada and Trinidad looking for traces of long dead Scotsmen who repatriated West India fortunes which ‘improved’ Scottish regions. His first monograph, The Glasgow Sugar Aristocracy: Scotland and Caribbean Slavery, 1775-1838 (2022) was published by University of London Press in the Royal Historical Society/Institute of Historical Research flagship New Historical Perspectives series.