Cameron Bowman

Research Topic: Locating Natural Slavery in the Enlightenment

I'm an intellectual historian interested in a broad range of topics. My doctoral thesis focuses on attitudes to slavery in the Enlightenment. The project investigates the Aristotelian notion of natural slavery—that some people are slaves by nature—in a European Enlightenment context. I’m attempting to uncover and contextualise the employment of natural slavery arguments in the long eighteenth century, in particular assessing the interpretation of non-European people as unable to form sophisticated modes of government or access political self-consciousness. The project will contribute to scholarship on a pressing contemporary issue: understanding the historical legitimations of relationships of subordination.

My graduate studies are being supported thanks to the Angus Hawkins Scholarship at Keble college, which I was awarded in 2023.

I completed my undergraduate degree in History and Spanish at the University of Exeter and my Master's in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History at Queen Mary University of London. 

Supervisor: Ian McBride