Atlantic Slave Trade

This theme explores the juridical and coercive frameworks established to regulate, intervene, and adjudicate the illegal transatlantic slave trade following abolition treaties. It focuses on the operation of mixed commission courts, the negotiation between imperial and local sovereignties, the mechanisms addressing liberated Africans and recaptives, and the interplay of coercion with negotiated settlements. Understanding these legal and coercive interventions reveals the complexity of abolition enforcement and highlights the ways law functioned as both a tool of imperial domination and a site of contestation and value exchange.

While the transatlantic passage of enslaved Africans has been extensively studied, this theme addresses the underexamined intra-American slave trade that redistributed enslaved people within and across colonial empires in the Americas prior to formal abolition in the early 19th century. It investigates the geographic, political, and economic factors shaping intercolonial slave routes, including both intra-imperial trades and transimperial clandestine exchanges. Understanding these patterns enriches the historiography by illuminating the forced continued mobility of enslaved populations, adaptations of trade in response to imperial politics and local needs, and the complexity of plantation economies dependent on secondary slave markets.

This theme interrogates the relative roles of Lisbon and its empire in outfitting slave ships and provisioning cargoes, challenging historiographical assumptions privileging colonial Brazilian dominance and downplaying Portugal's metropolitan involvement. It examines newly compiled datasets on ship voyages and cargo values, underscores Lisbon as a key node in the slave trading network, and explores the complex economic systems underlying Portuguese slave trade operations. Such analysis broadens understanding of the Atlantic slave trade beyond colonial ports, emphasizing metropolitan contributions and the transimperial dynamics of the trade.

This thematic cluster foregrounds the lived experiences, resistance strategies, and cultural adaptations of enslaved Africans within and beyond the transatlantic slave trade. It explores maroonage, identity formation aboard slave ships, contested spaces of freedom, and the socio-cultural dynamics mediating captivity and emancipation. Insights into cognitive, social, and material agency demonstrate that enslaved peoples actively shaped their destinies despite extreme violence and dispossession, contributing new perspectives to slavery studies by centering African-descended actors' experiences and resilience across the Atlantic world.

This theme investigates how museums, public monuments, and social spaces reflect, suppress, or contest the memory of the transatlantic slave trade and its aftermath. It examines methods of uncovering hidden histories in museum collections, the politics of public monuments amid social movements like Black Lives Matter, and evolving community demands for more inclusive and critical representations of colonial and slave-trade histories. These analyses illuminate ongoing struggles over historical memory, identity, and social justice.

Recent scholarship has re-examined Spain’s transatlantic slave trading role and its colonial practices in West Africa, emphasizing the often-overlooked complicity of metropolitan and colonial actors and the sovereign resistance of African communities to foreign incursions. This theme covers archival revelations of Spanish slave trade contracts, the contested sovereignty of Gulf of Guinea islanders resisting Spanish slave trading ambitions, and historiographical critiques on Spain’s marginalization in dominant Atlantic slavery narratives, thereby contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of Iberian involvement and African agency.

This theme analyzes the perspectives of eighteenth-century French abolitionists, particularly André-Daniel Laffon de Ladébat and the Girondins of Bordeaux, who combined economic reasoning and moral arguments to oppose slavery. It explores their quantitative assessments of the costs and productivity differences between slave and free labor, proposed gradual emancipation policies, and political activities amidst a slave trade-dependent regional economy. The study situates these abolitionists within the broader Revolutionary debates on slavery, colonialism, and commerce, illustrating emergent abolitionist rationales during a critical historical juncture.