Freedom in Chains: Black Slavery in the Atlantic, 1400s-1800s

This course will focus on the history of slavery in the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch Atlantic world(s), from the late 1400s to the 1800s. Its main focus will be on the experiences of enslaved Africans and their descendants. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Europeans forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans to the Americas. Drawing on methodologies used by historians, archaeologists and anthropologists, the course will reconstruct the daily lives and the socio-economic, cultural and political histories of these captives. We will seek to hear their voices by investigating a variety of historical testimonies and recent scholarship. The course will examine slavery in the context of broader trends in Atlantic World studies, a field that has grown considerably in recent years, providing new ways of understanding historical developments across national boundaries. We will seek to identify commonalities and differences across time periods and regions and the reasons for those differences. Covered topics will include slave ship voyages, labor, agency, the creation of new identities (creolization), religion, race, gender, resistance, legacies, and memory.