This course examines key aspects of the Transatlantic Slave Trade from its establishment until its abolition. It considers how systems of racial slavery in the Americas shaped our modern world with enormous economic, cultural, social, ideological, and political consequences. There will be a focus on gender throughout, and participants will compare slavery in North America with that in the Caribbean and South America. A range of themes will be explored, including resistance, slave labour, the infamous middle passage, the origins of racial slavery, and the effects of abolition. Crucially, the course will centre the voices and experiences of the enslaved, and participants will engage with an array of archival materials including enslaved people’s testimony, fugitive slave autobiographies, slave voyage ledgers, runaway slave advertisements, plantation journals, and bills of sale.
Students will also have the exciting opportunity to tour All Souls College Library, University of Oxford, to examine the relationship between British institutions and the transatlantic slave trade. In the eighteenth century, All Souls College received funds from Christopher Codrington, a former Fellow of All Souls, whose wealth derived from plantations worked by enslaved people, and this tour will examine the steps taken by All Souls College to address its intricate ties to slavery and the transatlantic slave trade.