Title: Shelburne's Silence on Slavery: Action and Inaction in an Age of Revolution

Speaker: Professor David Hancock (University of Michigan)

Date: Monday 24 April 2023

Time: 18:30

Venue: Great Hall, King’s College London

Professor David Hancock of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Director of The Atlantic Studies Initiative researches and lectures on the Atlantic World, Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain and Colonial America, as well as the history of Business and Capitalism. A specialist on the long eighteenth century, he is the author of Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785 (1995), and Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and Taste (2009). in 2002 he edited The Letters of William Freeman, London Merchant, 1678-1685 for the London Record Society, and also edited the Early America volume in Pickering & Chatto’s series Public Drinking in the Early Modern World: Voices from the Tavern, 1500-1800 (2011). He is currently working on an edition of the Accountbooks of John Hull, Mintmaster of Colonial Massachusetts.

Hancock received his A.B. in History from the College of William and Mary in 1980, an A.M. in Musicology from Yale University in 1983, and a Ph.D. and A.M. in History from Harvard University in 1990. He taught at Harvard between 1990 and 1996 when he moved to Michigan. He has also been a Visiting Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 2003 and at Queen Mary University’s School of Business and Management in 2008. He was awarded the American Philosophical Society’s Franklin Fellowship in 2008-9, the Huntington Library’s R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellowship in 2012-13 and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2015-16. Most recently, he received a Omohundro Institute fellowship from the Georgian Papers Programme at Windsor Castle in 2017.

Hancock is the fifth Sons of the American Revolution Visiting Professor at King’s College London, and we are extremely grateful to SAR for their generosity in supporting this position over the past five years. Quite apart from the scholarship carried out during their tenures (which is now appearing in print) each of the former holders – Andrew O’Shaughnessy, Gabriel Paquette, Kate Carte and David Armitage – has made a really important contribution to the Programme through their comradeship and support of other scholars and students associated with the programme, and the annual Sons of the American Revolution GPP lecture has become a key occasion in the GPP calendar.

Sons of the American Revolution Georgian Papers Programme Lecture