The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery

The Origins of Political Economy core warmly invites you to a talk by Professor John Harpham who will present his new book The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2025). The book seeks to answer a simple question: How did American slavery come to be seen, not only as necessary or profitable, but as legitimate? In search for answers, the book ranges widely across the early-modern Atlantic world, and incorporates evidence from political theory, law, literature, anthropology, and cartography. The result is a surprising account that unsettles established narratives of national origins.

In cooperation with the European Democracy Institute.

John Harpham is Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics and Letters and Wick Cary Assistant Professor in the Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage. He is an historian of political thought and intellectual historian. His research examines ideas about slavery, freedom, and race, as well as the relation of such ideas to practices of enslavement and resistance across the Atlantic world. He is at work on a three-volume series about the ideas associated with the origins, development, and eventual abolition of slavery in the Anglo-American Atlantic world. The first volume in this series—titled The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery—was published with Harvard University Press in the Fall of 2025 and will come out in paperback in Winter 2027.

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For more information, e-mail [email protected].

Time: 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1

Location: Online (link TBA)

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