Adam Smith

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.