Atlantic Slavery Research Articles

Archaeology under the Blinding Light of Race

Racism is defined as a modern system of inequity emergent in Atlantic slavery in which “Whiteness” is born and embedded. This essay describes its transformation. The operation of racist Whiteness i...

Atlantic Slavery and the Making of the Modern World: Experiences, Representations, and Legacies

This introductory article outlines the general orientations of the Wenner-Gren Foundation’s 158th symposium held in Sintra, Portugal, in the autumn of 2018. It summarizes and reflects on the various communications and teases out how the entanglements of Atlantic slavery, knowledge production, and colonization shaped the modern world. It then contemplates a more equitable future through alternative problem-solving anthropology.

Raising the Dead

The article examines walls of names commemorating the victims of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade in US heritage sites and museums. By exploring how, during the twentieth century, memorials of wars and genocides in Europe, Africa, and the Americas have featured walls of names to honor the dead, this article proposes a genealogy of the walls of names, by emphasizing the various contexts in which this device has been employed. Whereas naming has been a long-standing practice to honor the dead since antiquity, naming enslaved individuals in ship manifests or farm books was part of a process of dehumanization. Yet, during the last 30 years, emerging initiatives commemorating slavery incorporated walls of names to recognize the humanity of enslaved men, women, and children. By looking at a few case studies in the United States, the article seeks to understand how effectively this specific kind of memorial has been employed to recognize and pay homage to the victims of slavery.

An Illegitimate Offspring: South Sea Islanders, Queensland Sugar, and the Heirs of the British Atlantic Slave Complex

Abstract This article argues that Pacific Islander labour in Australia was not analogous to earlier Atlantic world slavery and can better be understood as its ‘illegitimate offspring’. Through case studies that connect the Caribbean to Australia, it reveals how the idea of Pacific Islander labour was forged in an environment where the abolitionist battle had been won, but where the interconnected and changing racial constructions of the time, and arguments about what constituted free labour, were very much ongoing. Money, values and personnel moved from the Caribbean and Mauritius to Australia, as explored through the stories of James Williams, a convict of African origin who grew Australia’s first sugar, and Benjamin Boyd, the son of an Atlantic slave trader who first introduced Pacific Islanders to Australia. The final case study is that of Louis Hope, whose mother’s family, the Wedderburns, had previously gained considerable notoriety in the Atlantic world for the way that they treated their enslaved people. Hope was the first person in Australia to employ a large Pacific Islander workforce on his sugar plantation.

The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean

The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean

African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic

Historians and anthropologists, from Melville Herskovits to David Eltis, have detailed the intimate relationship between capitalism and slavery and long acknowledged modernity's cultural debt to Africans and African Americans. In the process, argues Herman Bennett in African Kings and Black Slaves, scholars have superimposed a subsuming “liberal order” over early Atlantic historiography (p. 20). The overemphasis on commodification and race, in particular, overlooks a critical fifteenth-century phase in the genealogy of slavery. The early Atlantic was not articulated through regimes of property or racialized difference, Bennett argues, but rather through Afro-European logics of sovereignty and dispossession through which liberalism, chattel slavery, and the modern economy would later emerge.In six concise chapters, Bennett engages a wide historiography and offers new perspectives on early Atlantic legal culture, political and religious authority, pageantry, and slavery. Bennett complicates the narrative that Europeans rendered Africans into property and capital through Roman law and Christian theology. He draws from the Catholic legal corpus of extra ecclesiam and humanist writings on sovereignty and natural law to offer careful reappraisals of the Romanus Pontifex (1455) and similar authoritative texts that dealt with non-Christians. Bennett argues that as trading vessels plied the early Atlantic, ecclesiastical authorities restricted Iberian plunder in Africa, just as they had in Andalusia, with legal precedents from Pope Innocent IV (1243) and others. Secular authorities, too, drew from Hostiensian arguments that limited illegal encroachment and dispossession. Pontiffs and legal scholars drew from a rich crusading legalese to shield non-Christians from unjust war and enslavement. Thus, while Roman law and Christian theology sanctioned slavery through just war and rescate, they also helped curtail the development of chattel slavery in the fifteenth-century Atlantic.The strength of African kings also helped curtail enslavement by Europeans. As Portuguese and Castilian monarchs extended trade in Guinea, slavers and traders approached territories with strong lords who limited Europeans to fortified trading factories along the coast. Despite princely ambitions, Bennett claims, slavery's marriage to capitalism in the fifteenth century was bridled by the twin forces of strong African lordship and a dynamic Catholic legal system. A matrix of civil, feudal, and ecclesiastical precedents evolved to extend dominium and imperium to non-Christians, allowing African lords and subjects the right to live outside of grace without European intrusion. While substantial literature details the strength of these African polities elsewhere, Bennett's nuanced analysis of the centrality of canon law to limiting European expansion is a welcome addition to the historiography.African Kings and Black Slaves does not rebuff the history of early Iberian commercial interest in Guinea. Rather, it situates fifteenth-century Christian institutions and Afro-European politics at the center of a discussion of modernity. Drawing on the influential works of Paul Gilroy and Alexander Weheliye, Bennett locates modernity in Atlantic slavery not vis-à-vis liberty or the free market but through Christian dogma and political absolutism. As ecclesiastical and secular authorities recognized non-Christian dominium by Moorish and African kings, Bennett points out, they also stripped other Jews, Moors, and non-Christian Africans of corporate rights, instituting two key features of modernity: legal individualism and the erosion of corporate identity. Iberian trade increased along the African coast as clerical attempts to define sovereignty waned against the growth in secular authority. Bennett points to a rupture of the oikos (economy) as it eclipsed the polis (politics) following sustained European engagement with African slavery. Iberians came to understand sovereignty increasingly through the lens of African political theater, pageantry, captivity, and trade regimes. Europeans developed new slave taxonomies, engaged in African ritual diplomacy, and eventually adopted Atlantic slavery as a baseline of power in early modern absolutist regimes.Bennett's nuanced look at the intersections of Christianity, slavery, and imperial politics successfully engages Gilroy's thesis of modernity and pushes it back to the fifteenth century. His findings—that much of early modern Iberian political theory developed outside Europe, in Africa, among lords, theologians, and merchants equal in trade relations and governed by shared ideologies of sovereignty and dispossession—are provocative and should be debated by students and scholars alike. Bennett's clarity is as sharp as his criticism, which at times borders on piercing. His theoretical interventions are exciting. The analysis of the genesis of modernity through the logic of enslavement under slavery's relationship to imperial governance and church dogma might not transcend the “liberal order” as claimed, but it anchors the discourse more firmly in the history of religious legal practice and politics. African Kings and Black Slaves is one of the boldest and most successful attempts yet to engage the fields of African studies, history, and critical theory equally.

The past and present of abolition: reassessing Adam Smith’s “liberal reward of labor”

Abolish prisons; abolish police; abolish immigration enforcement: current “abolition” movements have yet to receive the attention that international political economy has given to its social justice forerunners, e.g. World Social Forum and Occupy. I argue that to make the current abolition movement legible to the field first requires a retrieval of abolition’s import for classical political economy. Towards this aim, I reassess the ways in which Adam Smith’s ethical prospecting of the “liberal reward of labor” referenced abolition. I then contextualize Smith’s agonistic argument for commercial society within late seventeenth to early nineteenth century struggles over imperial commerce, especially Atlantic slavery. For this purpose, I take a prompt from the institutional framework of “abolition democracy” provided by Angela Davis and WEB Du Bois. Specifically, I examine the ways in which the prospect of abolition challenged a) existing institutions that rendered enslaved labor in plantation economies as property; as well as b) the patriarchal institutions in England that rendered labor through a “master/servant” relation. I conclude by arguing that current abolition movements prompt us to address the obfuscation in classical political economy of particular agents and sites through which struggles over freedom have been waged across capital’s imperium.

Afro-Mexican Women in Saint-Domingue: Piracy, Captivity, and Community in the 1680s and 1690s

AbstractThis article focuses on the experiences of women of African descent who were made captives (and, in some cases, recaptives) after the 1683 buccaneer raid on Veracruz, the most important port in the Viceroyalty of New Spain (colonial Mexico). Although the raid is well known to historians of piracy, its implications for women's history and African diaspora studies have not been properly contextualized in a period of expanding Atlantic slavery. This article proposes a close reading of contraband cases, parochial registers, slave codes, and eyewitness accounts centered on Afro-Mexican women who were kidnapped to Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti). A focus on displacement and resilience opens new narratives through which to understand women who transcended their captivity by becoming spouses to French colonists and free mothers to Saint-Domingue's gens de couleur (people of mixed race).

Migration Themes and Transnational Identities in Mohammed Ben-Abdallah's The Slaves, Haile Gerima's Sankofa, and Rachid Bouchareb's Little Senegal

86 CLA JOURNAL Migration Themes and Transnational Identities in Mohammed Ben-Abdallah’s The Slaves, Haile Gerima’s Sankofa, and Rachid Bouchareb’s Little Senegal Helena Woodard Since at least the 1980s, high-profile West African slave forts, also known as dungeons, have attracted visitors in the international community for the forts’ role in the Atlantic Slave Trade. Ghana’s Elmina and Cape Coast Castles, along with Senegal’s House of Slaves at Gorée Island, originally functioned as holding cells or prisons for slave captives awaiting sell to European traders before being transported across the Atlantic in the Middle Passage. In Trade Castles and Forts of West Africa,A.W. Lawrence writes,“Nowhere else have small and transitory communities of traders so changed the life of the alien peoples who surrounded them and indirectly of a vast region beyond” (29). Renovated and designated as world heritage sites by UNESCO to mark its historical role in the slavery past, the slave fort has also appealed to certain writers who--through tourism as prism--transformed it from mass cultural artifact to a geo-political, public memory space. Though I write about the slave fort in the context of Atlantic Slavery in my book, Slave Sites on Display: Reflections of Slavery Through Contemporary “Flash” Moments, I am primarily interested, here, in the symbolic slave fort’s mediative function in select contemporary literature between African “locals” and disproportionately slave-descendant African Americans who travel to those sites.In this article,I have chosen to focus on three works that expose complexities in that relationship through partial or full settings that begin at a slave fort in Africa before evolving, diachronically, through a failed Pan-Africanist motif (or the notion of an African diaspora unification) to immersion in debate about tourism, responsibility for the slavery past, and relations between Africans and diaspora slave descendants. By appropriating that motif in this article, I regard the slave fort’s function as a potent symbol for Atlantic slavery through complications regarding departure and return for African diaspora slave descendants who visit slave forts as tourists, and their relationship with African locals that they encounter. Haile Gerima’s classic film, Sankofa (1993), and Rachid Bouchareb’s independent film, Little Senegal (2000), for example, employ migrations themes and transnational identities through African and slave-descendant African American protagonists, but their relationships demonstrate deep fissures largely attributed to the Atlantic Slave Trade. Opening scenes in Sankofa and Little Senegal foreground the slave fort--or what Playwright Mohammed Ben-Abdallah refers to in The Slaves as the “stone CLA JOURNAL 87 Migration Themes and Transnational Identities in The Slaves, Sankofa, and Little Senegal monster” by the sea--where an African griot and slave-descendant African Americans briefly converge and communicate a need to mend their strained relationships. Both films intersect with Ben-Abdallah’s The Slaves through the dungeon as a geo-political, public memory space. The play formalizes the dungeon as a foundational setting for Atlantic slavery, a precursor to the Middle Passage journey, and a foreshadowing of tensions between Africans and slave-descendant African Americans in contemporary society. I therefore place Sankofa and Little Senegal in conversation with The Slaves as these works dramatize the fort or dungeon as a pivotal, originary site that communicates a need for slave-descendant African Americans in the U.S. to connect with their African ancestry and the slave past in an effort to heal its lingering wounds. But while Ben-Abdallah allegorizes Atlantic Slavery within the confines of that space for captive Africans, Gerima and Bouchareb reinscribe its lineage in a complex meditation on slavery and race across the Atlantic through migrations themes and transnational identities for Africans and slave-descendant African Americans in contemporary society. Appropriating the Dungeon as Public Memory Space in The Slaves In anAuthor’s note about The Slaves Revisited,in the publication,titled The Fall of Kumbi and Other Plays, Mohammed Ben-Abdallah stated that his first objective for the revised script was“to provide a confrontation, a dialogue as it were, between the pain and angst of Africa at large, and the Big, White, Stone Monster by the sea . . . the slave fort” (iii, 25 March 2011...

Breaking Museal Tradition: Guadeloupe’s “Mémorial ACTe” and the Scenography of Slavery

This article examines the degree to which the scenography of Guadeloupe’s new slavery memorial represents an important turning point in the narrativization and museumification of the French Atlantic slave trade and slavery. Neither purely museum, memorial, nor monument, but all three at the same time, the MACTe escapes traditional museal classification. By blurring the lines between history and fiction, connecting past and present, and juxtaposing “authenticating” historic relics and symbolic contemporary artistic creations in a nonhierarchical way, the MACTe enacts a Creole museography, whereby not one single element is placed above another.

아래로부터 대서양사 쓰기: 노예제와 아이티혁명의 시각에서 본 대서양사의 과제

아래로부터 대서양사 쓰기: 노예제와 아이티혁명의 시각에서 본 대서양사의 과제

MARY WILLIAMSON'S LETTER, OR, SEEING WOMEN AND SISTERS IN THE ARCHIVES OF ATLANTIC SLAVERY

ABSTRACT‘I was a few years back a slave on your property of Houton Tower, and as a Brown woman was fancied by a Mr Tumming unto who Mr Thomas James sold me.’ Thus begins Mary Williamson's letter, which for decades sat unexamined in an attic in Scotland until a history student became interested in her family's papers, and showed it to Diana Paton. In this article, Paton uses the letter to reflect on the history and historiography of ‘Brown’ women like Mary Williamson in Jamaica and other Atlantic slave societies. Mary Williamson's letter offers a rare perspective on the sexual encounters between white men and brown women that were pervasive in Atlantic slave societies. Yet its primary focus is on the greater importance of ties of place and family – particularly of relations between sisters – in a context in which the ‘severity’ of slavery was increasing. Mary Williamson's letter is a single and thus-far not formally archived trace in a broader archive of Atlantic slavery dominated by material left by slaveholders and government officials. Paton asks what the possibilities and limits of such a document may be for generating knowledge about the lives and experiences of those who were born into slavery.

Mainstreaming African Diasporic Foodways When Academia Is Not Enough

AbstractMore than a decade after Britain's bicentennial commemoration of the 1807 Abolition Act to end the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Scotland still struggles to reconcile her colonial past. Unlike in North America, historical archaeology centered on the history and legacy of the transatlantic slave trade is still highly marginalized in British academia. Furthermore, Scotland's roles in slave‐based economies is only recently being considered a relevant area of historical studies. This paper emerges from my evolving perspective as a Black American scholar and resident in the United Kingdom, as I strive to create intellectual spaces in and outside of academia. Through civic engagement, I use my work on African diasporic foodways in the French Caribbean to link with a similar material basis of resistance in the British Caribbean and engage British audiences whose connections to Atlantic slavery are yet to be fully recognized.

Race and Religion in the Afterlife of Protestant Supremacy

In her bookChristian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World, Katharine Gerbner offers a rich history of Protestant planters’ efforts to tether Christian identity to free status and European descent in the American colonies, and missionaries’ answering attempts to reconcile African and indigenous conversion with enslavement. Gerbner's concept of Protestant Supremacy names the sociopolitical function and economic utility of “religious belonging,” specifically how Christian institutional, discursive, and ritual spaces demarcated boundaries between the enslaved and their enslavers, prefiguring race in the process. In this history of Atlantic slavery, religion is not subsidiary to the punitive, legal, sexual, and economic systems that enabled the enslavement of African and indigenous peoples in the Americas. Rather, Gerbner argues that Protestant Christianity provided a metastructure for the race-based caste systems that emerged in Barbados and other British colonies in the Americas. Through an intense and extensive interrogation of correspondence, missionary accounts, and institutional records from across the Atlantic, she traces how Protestant emissaries established “Christian” as a “protoracial” term and hastened the legal and discursive codification of lineage-based American caste systems in the process. The linkage of Christian identity and nascent whiteness not only exposes the Protestant architecture of American racial logics, but also sparks nuanced questions about how African, indigenous, and creole people oriented themselves toward Protestantism in early America. In this way, Gerbner definitively situates religion at the center of ongoing conversations about racial formation in the Americas, while opening up avenues for fresh speculation and imaginative intellectual trajectories in studies of American religion and Atlantic slavery.

Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora

The first written account of surfing, according to most scholars, dates to 1778 in Hawaii. Yet, as Kevin Dawson (a surfer himself) points out, those scholars are “a hundred and forty years too late, and some ten thousand miles off the mark,” because the first account of surfing was actually recorded in the 1640s on Africa's Gold Coast (p. 28). This is one of many surprises that readers will find in Dawson's enlightening Undercurrents of Power, which explores the “aquatic fluencies” of early modern Africans and African-descended people, concentrating on the eighteenth century (p. 2). Rejecting the “landlocked paradigms” that have, in Dawson's view, predominated in studies of the African diaspora, he shows how “waterscapes” served as crucial social, cultural, and working spaces on both sides of the Atlantic (p. 251).Dawson argues that people throughout Africa lived, worked, and socialized along rivers, lakes, and the sea and that the many aquatic skills they developed in those “amphibious culturescapes”—especially swimming, underwater diving, canoe making, and canoeing—were easily transferred to the Americas along with a host of cultural practices and spiritual beliefs about water (p. 4). The book is divided into two parts, the first on “swimming culture” and the second on “canoe culture,” with topical chapters that move between Africa and the Americas. Dawson contrasts the excellent swimming abilities of Africans and their descendants—who were proficient swimmers from early childhood—with Europeans, most of whom were either nonswimmers or bad swimmers who frequently drowned in maritime accidents. “Swimming pervaded Africans' muscle memory,” Dawson writes, “and was one of the easiest skills to carry to the Americas” (p. 12).Once there, enslaved Africans used their aquatic expertise in a variety of ways, including as a means of evading whites who tried to sexually abuse them and as a pathway to freedom. Enslaved men participated in “aquatic blood sports” such as shark and alligator fighting and raced canoes as ways of displaying bravery and masculine honor. In these and other ways, swimming “took on new meanings” under New World slavery, distinguishing slaves “from their poor-swimming enslavers” and “becoming . . . a form of cultural resilience and resistance” (p. 36). Dawson similarly stresses the “strikingly similar” designs of African and American dugout canoes as evidence of the “persistence of African canoe-making expertise” in the Americas in order to support his larger argument for cultural retention (pp. 102, 155).At the same time, the aquatic skills that Africans brought to the Americas and passed on to their children were central to the project of European colonization, with enslavers virtually everywhere putting Africans to work as underwater divers, salvagers of shipwrecks, and makers of canoes used to transport plantation produce. Dawson devotes considerable attention to the dangerous and difficult work of divers, who “pried concessions from enslavers, exchanging prowess for semi-independent lives of privileged exploitation” (p. 85). From the Pearl Coast of South America—which “probably generated more wealth than anywhere else in the Americas” before the discovery of silver in what is now Peru—to maritime colonies such as Bermuda and the Bahamas, which relied not on plantation agriculture but on salvaging shipwrecks, enslaved divers' labor enriched colonizers (p. 72). Europeans relied on African maritime expertise along Africa's Atlantic coast, too—most notably the canoeists who transported goods and captives between European sailing ships and African shores.Overall, Undercurrents of Power is an important contribution to the study of Atlantic slavery and the African diaspora that succeeds in illuminating the many ways that “slaves recreated and reimagined African traditions in New World waterscapes” (p. 251). Dawson's ability to synthesize a broad range of (mostly) English-language sources that document African practices of swimming, diving, boat making, and canoeing in West Africa, the Caribbean, and North America is impressive and should inspire scholars of Latin America to pay greater attention to the ways that waterscapes were central to the experiences of enslaved people throughout the Americas.

Escravismo Atlântico no século XIX: a construção do "internacional" no mar

Este artigo almeja trazer o comércio transatlântico de pessoas escravizadas para o centro do debate historiográfico e teórico das Relações Internacionais, em particular no que tange à formação e evolução do sistema internacional de Estados soberanos. Tal movimento se dá fundamentalmente em dois passos. Em um primeiro momento, promovemos uma discussão nos termos da Escola Inglesa, como tradição teórica que se debruça sobre a evolução histórica da política internacional. Demonstramos, com esse engajamento crítico, o silenciamento da disciplina para a escravização transatlântica como uma “instituição fundamental” da “sociedade internacional”. No segundo momento, avaliamos as consequências teóricas da inclusão do comércio e exploração do trabalho de pessoas no rol de instituições fundamentais que formam a sociedade internacional. Questionamos se tal inclusão é suficiente para desfazer o que identificamos como “silêncio constitutivo” que a escravidão atlântica representa para a disciplina e se a inclusão desta instituição internacional reforma as premissas eurocêntricas sobre as quais se baseia a Escola Inglesa. A partir daí, propomos uma reflexão epistemológica sobre a historiografia das Relações Internacionais que aponta para um diálogo mais profundo entre teoria e história, a partir de evoluções recentes nos campos da Sociologia Histórica e dos estudos Pós/Decoloniais.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin Historic Site and creolization: the material and visual culture of archival memory

ABSTRACTThe Uncle Tom’s Cabin Historic Site in Dresden, Ontario is dedicated to the life of Josiah Henson (1796–1883), a Reverend, abolitionist, and ‘conductor’ on the Underground Railroad. The Historic Site is also located on what remains of the Dawn Settlement. Creolization in the context of Trans Atlantic Slavery is thought to have occurred when select elements from the enslaved were mixed, intertwined and reframed with different sets of meanings within sites of enslavement, such that new identities, realities, and sensibilities emerged. Creolization also reflects a relationship between time and space, and the erasure of a past that is replaced by a hybridized present. How is Henson’s creolized (‘real’) life and his fictionalized (‘fake’) life as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ‘Uncle Tom’ imagined at the Historic Site? In what ways does erasure frame how we read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as both an archive and a novel?

Stolen Life’s Poetic Revolt

Joining the discussion of revolution and resistance in world politics, this article puts forward the idea of poetic revolt as a necessary companion to these terms, one which centres attention on the ongoing reverberations of transatlantic slavery – what have been called its ‘afterlives’ (Saidiya Hartman, Édouard Glissant). Engaging with contributions to poetics, black studies and black feminist thought, it first develops a theoretical orientation of the ongoingness of slavery as a ‘grammar of captivity’ (Hortense Spillers) that ‘wake work’, a term proposed by Christina Sharpe, aims to disrupt. The article calls for methodological attention to the fugitive and wayward arts and acts of living, that is, what Sylvia Wynter and Fred Moten call the ‘sociopoetic’ practices of enslaved and legally-emancipated populations to illuminate the simultaneity and entanglement of structuring violence and poetic revolt. Second, drawing on Spillers’ scholarship on homiletics – the study of and participation in sermons – in particular United States contexts, it identifies and discusses three aspects of poetic revolt: ‘fabulation’, world-making otherwise and resignification, through which such communities developed a critical and insurgent posture aimed at rupturing this grammar of captivity and at forging critical, futurally-oriented sociabilities. Third, in conclusion, it discusses the links of poetic revolt, in its specificity in Atlantic slavery, to wider systemic critique. Pluralising our thinking on revolution and resistance, poetic revolt, it argues, is best seen as a critical meditation on futurity.

Archival encounters: rethinking access and care in digital colonial archives

The year of 2017 marked the centennial of Denmark’s sale of the former Danish West Indies to the United States of America, today the US Virgin Islands (USVI). The colonial archives figured prominently during the year-long commemorations in Denmark, as the Danish National Archives digitized and publicly released the colonial records of the islands of St. Croix, St. Thomas and St. John. Drawing on cultural theories as well as debates in archival science, this article proposes the notion of ‘archival encounter’ to centre the ethical-epistemological challenges of digitization and to emphasize the intersected problematics raised by the encounter between the colonial, the archival and the digital. The article begins by revisiting the history of these archives in order to situate the digitization of these records within debates on provenance, custody and access. It then introduces some of the debates taking place within the field of Atlantic slavery, as well as feminist and critical race theories, to argue that the digitization of the USVI records recasts questions about the limitations and possibilities of colonial archives. Furthermore, the article contends that digitality and datafication are indebted to colonial histories of quantification that structure the technological encounter with the colonial archive. Finally, the article builds on these theorizations to amplify recent calls for a feminist ethics of care in archival praxis. Drawing on postcolonial critiques, the article problematizes and situates the notion of care within the colonial and non-innocent histories in which it is embedded, in order to align ethics of care with a critical reorientation of digital colonial archives. Marshalling a postcolonial feminist critique of care as a framework for thinking, the article suggests, can help us to realign archival encounters in ways that that more pointedly confront the colonial legacies of our present.

A história global da escravidão atlântica: balanço e perspectivas

Neste artigo, parte-se de um levantamento de abordagens sobre a escravidão atlântica com vistas a avaliar a pertinência da história global para o tratamento de determinadas temáticas. Em primeiro lugar, realiza-se um balanço historiográfico rastreando-se trabalhos e abordagens passadas e presentes sobre o tema, produzidos no âmbito da história comparada e, mais recente e explicitamente, da história global, cujas contribuições fornecem subsídios importantes para o campo de nosso interesse. Em seguida, apresentam-se algumas considerações teóricas e metodológicas para fundamentar a construção de uma agenda de pesquisa para a história global que tenha como cerne de suas preocupações a multiplicidade temporal da escravidão atlântica em suas relações com a dinâmica do capitalismo histórico.