until 1808 and the u.s. of the first moment it could president jefferson sent legislation to congress that band participation of the trade by u.s. persons and congress passed that so in 1808 they prohibited the slave trade which was a long time before slavery itself ended in the united states that the issues were seen as different and even southerners were in support of banning the slave trade >> there were a lot of different reasons. it was the more in humane part of the traffic but also the economic self-interest. they already owned slaves and the environment in the u.s. is such that mortality wasn't in the plantations that is it was in places like to the or brazil

because the environment and the diseases as they could be they would live for a decent life span so by banning the slave trade that would increase the value they already owned that limit the ability of their neighbors. so it was an odd coalition. >> you have a part in your book that shows. where is this going here? >> there is a strong despite right before we ban it because we know that position as it turned in 1808 congress was going to ban the trade. >> the other half is about the international human rights law. when does the human rights law start becoming a part of this

discussion? >> around the turn of the century but people think that international human rights law is a product of the 20th century. that is in most people said it is after world war ii. so the holocaust happened and as the news of that came out a bunch of things happened after world war ii. there was the trial of the criminals, similar trials in the far east. the u.n. was founded, universal declaration of human rights. that's the moment everyone says it started to look at human rights issues. in my book i said it was in connection with the slave trade that the international law was used for the human rights purpose and so in the early 19th century starting in 1807 and 1808 when countries like the u.s., britain was another country that band the slave trade are found that in the began to spread throughout the countries that had been engaged in the slave trade but this is no longer a practice they wanted to participate.

it was violating natural rights and the same ideas of the rights that underpin the u.s. revolution and the revolution in france, the deprivation of independence says we hold these to be self evident all men are created equal with certain inalienable rights. obviously there was tension between that and the existence of slavery that those ideas were spreading throughout the atlantic world and there were some religious movements. the quakers among other religious groups were very active politically and they received slavery to be morally wrong. so it became more active in the civil society to put pressure on the government to say we have to stop the trade and because it was an international problem all the countries of europe that were engaged in the troubles were participating. it wasn't something just one country could stop. even if the u.s. that we are

banning the slave trade or britain said we are banning the slave trade that wasn't going to be enough because spain, portugal, france, the netherlands, these other countries were going to pick up the slack and transport to the new world. so it quickly became apparent that in order to eradicate the practice there was going to have to be international cooperation. so abolitionists put pressure on the government and they were receptive to that pressure and they began lobbying other governments to enter into the trees that would prohibit the slave trade. in the first like many modern international treaties work with what we call the said slavery is wrong we want to ban the trade with the included nobel. they said this is what it's great to be about. and so they began pushing for

enforcement measures and crete to the treaties and 1817 that not only ban the slave trade to create international courts to enforce the ban more than a century before the tribunals. these reports were created by the treaties to promote the human rights objectives of ending the slave trade and what they would do this if they were caught and engaged in the slave trade it would be brought before one of these international courts and if they found out that was covered by the treaty and there was a treaty between britain and spain saying we are ending the slave trade what happened is they would be freed and the ship would be auctioned off and the money would be split between the sea captain who brought the ship in may and the governments that were involved. so the international courts as i recount in the book heard from some 600 cases and freed 80,000 slaves of the ships which is a huge number in the scale.

>> 1808. >> was the name of these international courts? >> they are given different names. there were bilateral treaties between britain and other countries. spain, portugal, brazil and the u.s. essentially joined during the civil war that they were called the next commission or sometimes the next court and the reason they were called next is because they involved judges from different countries so there'd be a british and a brazilian judge and if they couldn't agree they would toss a claim and pick a fair to judge from one of the countries to help decide the case. the u.s. initially was reluctant to participate in the traditional system for a variety of reasons some of which had to do with domestic politics. the treaty can before the senate in 1824 right before the hotly adams waspresidential election.

running for president and there was a lot of politics that went around it and there were also concerns about the british and whether the british were using this abolitionism campaign as a kind of advance in their desire to control the ocean and that had been a long source of tension between the u.s. and britain. one of the causes of the war 1812 is the way that the british navy were aboard american ships and would conscript americans on board and say we don't think you're really america, you are british and that is why we are drifting you into the navy to fight against the war against france said this was a tension between the u.s. and britain and it wasn't politically popular to sign the treaty the would give the british the right to search american ships if they felt they were participating in the slave trade. it different version did go to the senate and they had a bunch

of reservations or changes including a provision that the cases would be tried in the american courts rather than these international courts and they changed the geographical scope and the british were not willing to go along with it. so the treaty failed in the 18 twenties and the u.s. and britain cooperated in the 1830's where the british and american navy ship patrol off the coast of africa looking for illegal slaves from either country and if the british happened to catch an american slave trade ship they would bring it over to the american navy and vice versa. there was an unofficial cultivation the navy's worked on their own on the other side of the world and eventually the government said what are you doing there isn't a treaty that covers this. this just isn't something the governments want to do so one of the consequences was the because the u.s. wasn't able to consistently invest in the sort

of naval protections and enforce the ban on sleeve trading by the american ships there were time period engaged in the house slave trade so it wasn't until 1852 in the middle of the civil war president lincoln's administration sent the treaty to the senate and was ratified that they joined the system of international courts and really dramatically right after they joined the system. there was only one bit that was active which was the trade to cuba and was carried on heavily even though it was against the american law and they engaged in the slave trading and indeed even the confederate constitution prohibited the trade. but as soon as they joined the system making it possible for britain and other countries to really sounds well the last remaining branch dropped

precipitously by 1865 the trans-atlantic slave trade was over. there were no more sleaves being taken from africa to the new world. >> between 1808 -- from 1808 and on, how heavy was of the illegal smuggling? >> it depends where you are looking at. from the u.s. there wasn't a lot of smuggling into the u.s. after 1808. there was some but the measures were pretty effective. if you were caught you would be punished in some way. only one person received the death penalty for engaging in the trading that it was the there were not a large amount of imports in the u.s.. on the other hand, cuba and brazil which the country that they were participants the had sort of legally band the slave trade they didn't have any kind of an effect on the land and indeed the government was pretty corrupt so throughout that time

from 1808 to the 1860's there was a lot of smuggling and some of it wasn't covert. the government and the region it could be pretty open the white even advertise on the newspaper where the slave markets were going to be held but what is interesting as they played a role in the ending of it so in brazil for example in the 1850's the british were putting strong pressure on them to take stronger measures against the smuggling into the country even british ships fired shots in the harbor and there was a debate in parliament and one of the members of parliament said everyone has joined the system. are we along to stand outside and allow this to continue and they saw themselves and the civilized country and they wanted to be part of the

community of nations and as a consequence in the early 1850's brazil passed effective legislation and started enforcing it and so there was basically an end to the illegal import of slaves to brazil in relation to the international pressure. >> are these next commissions forgotten or used as models for later international human rights treaties? >> they were remembered for a while. so in the early 1940's during world war ii and the permanent court of international justice the predecessr and the international court of justice to hear international disputes and the was to write a report about what is to be done with the war criminals after world war ii ended to give his report suggested what became the norm burke trials.

when he talks about the precedents for the international courts he mentions the tribunal's. there were a variety of groups of interactive in the 1930's working on human rights issues proposing forms of international court and they also mentioned that tribunals as one of the historical examples of the international courts. the focus of the 1940's was a lot more crimes against peace when prosecutor that nor numbered for the process of engaging warfare which of the nazi regime had. now we'll look back and we think was about human rights violations and crimes against humanity but actually it was that kind of aggression the was more of the focus and so that may be one of the reasons why in the immediate aftermath of world war ii the trade tribunals although they were remembered in the 30's and 40's the started to fade out of memory as they were replaced by a number of which had a slightly different focus and then they really were sort offorgotten by the historians

of international law and historians of the slave trade recognize them as a part of the abolition of the slave trade with people who study international law largely forgot them. >> how did you get your interest in the topic? >> i was looking at the courts and tribunals. i worked at the tribunal for the former yugoslavia created by the security council of the 1940's to deal with the war crime for bosnia and croatia and kosovo. i worked on one of the genocide trials and i was interested in international court and one of the things we did when i was at the court is we looked at a lot of the president. there were not a lot of other case law and we would do is see what the president would say and most from nuremberg were the other trials that have occurred in europe following world war ii so i became interested in nuremberg and where the idea came from and after i left

practicing law i had come to be a professor at stanford teaching international law. i was doing some research in the history of the international courts and looking at things like in the 17 nineties the u.s. and britain entered into the treaty and the revolutionary war that created the tribunal. i was at a conference talking to a judge on the special court for sierra leone which is the court that tried charles taylor for his crimes and tried of the human rights crimes and is one of these new international criminal court that has sprung up in the last decade or so. he asked what i was researching and i sat in looking at courts of the 19th century. he said of course the first international criminal courts in sierra leone. i said i've never heard of that and i studied this. he knew about it because the special court for sierra leone set in freetown and it was part

of this local court that heard these cases and there was a sort of local common knowledge but not something people were aware about and i discovered that they were excellent record keepers of the complete our clients are in the british archives in london so it was pretty easy to reconstruct what the court had done. >> and from that came this book of the slave trade and the origin of the human rights law, published by oxford. stanford law professor is the author. you are watching book tv on c-span2. an appetite for wonder is

the name of the book. the author, dr. richard dawkins who's written a best seller. dr. dawkins why did you choose to write an autobiography at this point? >> [inaudible] my mother is 96 and is a very useful resources to talk to and tapped her memory and has been a wonderful experience actually in effect interviewing her to write the book. it seemed like the right time to do it. this is in fact just the first half up to the age of 55 which marks a sort of natural watershed in my life and didn't make sense to divide it into book

this is the first one taking you through the childhood school days, the university and after riding the selfish gene after the age of 35. >> why was the selfish gene and national to the connatural halfway point for you? >> it changed my life. before that i was an ordinary research scientist white coat and after the selfish gene i went on teaching and doing some research but i became i suppose more of a public figure in writing books for large audiences. who were john and jean dawkins? >> they were my parents -- well my mother is still alive. my father was a biologist. his career began similar to

mine. we went to the same sort of school and then he read at oxford. he did research, i did research and he went into the british colonial which was something one did in those days and was posted in malawi in central east africa and then was called to fight in the war against the italians and i was born around that time. my mother was an art student and they had a shared love of wild things, wildflowers. so i was brought up in an atmosphere of the scientific inquiry and of love of nature.

>> and my parents had no interest in religion, but i was sent to the schools and would have loved to. that is what happened it was quite hard to find a school that wasn't in some way. >> when did you lose that connection? >> i suppose finally at the age of 16 when i was at school i had my doubts. i first of all had my doubts at the age of nine when my mother -- there were lots of different religions and when i was brought up that wasn't the only one. >> when you ask your parents about religion and about god how did they respond? >> i think my mother told me the standards of the christian stories as she began them which i believe she didn't. and i went to school.

>> richard dawkins, how did the selfish gene come about as a book? >> about ten years before i wrote it in 1966, i was asked by my boss the nobel prize-winning scientist if i would stand and give the lecture for him, he was on sabbatical leave. i wrote a course on honorable behavior which pretty much foreshadowed the rhetoric of the selfish gene and the idea of immortal genes bounding through the generations discarding the succession of bodies, all of that rhetoric within those lectures in 1966 and i felt at some point i might write it all down and i finally did so in 1976 when the selfish gene was published. you can find almost the same

worth as the electors i gave in 1966. i don't know why i delayed for so long. i actually started to put not pen to paper but typewriter key to paper in about 1972 or 73 when there was a strike in britain. so there were frequent power cuts i couldn't do my research and i thought now was the time to start writing that long promised book. >> because you didn't need electricity. >> in an appetite for wonder you talk about john smith to get who is he or who was he? >> he was a very wonderful man and a distinguished biologist. a very wonderful character. students loved him. he was funny, irreverent, constantly talking to students about real work. he didn't do any of the things

professors do like fuss about where the next is coming from. he just got along with it and his tools of the trade were pretty much a pencil and paper because he inspired generations of students. he inspired me. although i was never directly his student. many of his ideas are incorporated and play a big role in the selfish gene. >> after this was published how did your life change as a professor? did you become a celebrity professor in a sense? >> not immediately. the book did sell very well over a million copies in total. i did find myself being invited to do lots of things i hadn't done before.

it did change my life and set the on the new course of writing on the other books after that. estimate here in the states you are quite well known not only as a scientist but also as an atheist bigot when did you start writing about that and ernest? >> it has information without and it doesn't conceal that. i suppose all of my books -- the next book i read for the popular audience is all about the argument from design which is still i think the dominant reason why most people will give the supreme being looked at the nature of the birds, flowers, it is too complicated by chance and

it is too complicated to come upon by chance. it can by natural selection which is the opposite of chance. so the blind watchmaker was an attempt to explain that to people and was taken as an atheistic book by many people. i think the subtitle in america was something like why the evidence of evolution shares the design or something of that sort. so the wind watchmaker was at least interpreted as an atheistic book and all of my other books since then could be interpreted in the same way. the only book that is explicitly and at length atheist is because the god delusion published in 2006 which i think that is my biggest seller. it sold more than 2 million copies in english and i don't know how many and maybe 34 countries. but apart from that my books haven't been diverted to atheism in the way the god delusion has.

estimate charles darwin, your hero in the appetite for wonder. >> india, yes. charles darwin was a brilliant thinker and brilliant explainer. one of the things i find surprising is the idea which is so simple. it came two years after newton and you might think that what he did as clever and more difficult to think of and invent the calculus working out of the optics and understanding gravity and all of mechanics. these are all supreme achievements of the human mind. 200 years before darwin. somebody that's written about science and ideas what was it like to write about yourself? >> quite difficult.

>> i was persuaded by the british and american publishers worth doing. i like to think it is humorous and i like to think there are plenty of laughs to it i kind of enjoyed writing it. >> did you end up enjoying it? >> yes. reliving the memories isn't a systematic history of my life. i had in mind when i started writing it, so that kind of random memory i hope in a funny way as to encapsulate a life. estimate it will be in the bookstores in september of 2013. is this the american cover or the english and american -- >> that is the american cover.

the british cover is sideways on view. it's not smiling. it's a sort of i suppose it's more poetic rather than cheerful. it has a little jar containing an insect engaging at this and inspecting this. >> why did it sell in england? >> i have no idea. publishers have their ways and i'm quite happy to have both of them out there. >> an appetite for wonder the making of the scientist. richard dawkins is the author. will be in bookstores in september of 2013. this is book tv on c-span2. ..

>> host: first of all congratulations professor on another great book. >> guest: thank you for reading it. it's different than past books by him excited it's finally done. >> host: so tell me, how did you find a savior general?