Atlantic Trade Research Articles

From Valuable Merchandise to Violent Rebels

From the moment the Dutch West Indian Company formally entered the slave trade in 1637, the Dutch periodical press consistently carried reports on slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. This article offers a long-term analysis of this coverage in the Dutch Republic, showing for the first time how the representation of slavery developed over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It demonstrates, first, that through the periodical press, knowledge of slavery was more widely spread in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century than is often assumed. The consistent, if intermittent, newspaper coverage meant that – well before the debates on abolition emerged – Dutch readers would be familiar with stereotypes of enslaved Africans as valuable merchandise or violent rebels. Second, this article argues that, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the periodical press offered its readers an ambiguous and contradictory image of slavery, contributing, on the one hand, to a public discourse underpinning slavery by depicting enslaved Africans as violent rebels, while at the same time covering political debates on the abolition of slavery.

WHAT IS HISTORY IN A SETTLER COLONIAL SOCIETY? MAPPING THE LIMITS AND POSSIBILITIES OF ETHICAL HISTORIOGRAPHY USING AN AUSTRALIAN CASE STUDY

ABSTRACTIn recent decades, the role of the history discipline as part of the architecture of colonization has become more visible and better understood. Such acknowledgement reflects foundational shifts in historical practice and theory prompted by transdisciplinary and transnational scholarship in fields such as postcolonial and settler‐colonial studies, First Nations knowledges, and historical perspectives and practices contextualized by transatlantic slavery. Their intervention in turn prompted a vital question: How do we map settler‐colonial historiography if the discipline has been complicit in the settler‐colonial project? Using Australian historiography as a case study, this article explores how History has been part of the architecture of colonization, policing whose stories can be told and by whom. Drawing on the work of Indigenous history‐makers and knowledge‐holders, it also points to ways that researchers might reach outside the traditional scope of historiography to map and contemplate the range of history‐making that comprises history in the settler colony.

‘Comrade unknown to me’: colonialism, modernity, and conjunctural translation in Familiar Stranger

ABSTRACT This essay considers the possibility of what I would call conjunctural translation. While literal translation has accelerated cultural ethnocentrism as well as settler colonial violence, conjunctural translation seeks to glimpse the possibility of solidarity buried beneath the collaborative rule among the empires. This essay first retraces colonial modernity in the British Caribbean and Britain. Reading the selected chapters from Familiar Stranger, I propose that this memoir registers the three phases of colonial modernity: transatlantic slavery, migration to metropolis, and the prison-house of identity politics. In contrast to this, literal translation was at the core of cultural ethnocentrism that underpinned colonial modernity in Korea and Japan. The second part of this essay explicates the relationship between colonialism and modernity in East Asia that is punctuated by the following three phases: settler colonialism, migration to metropolises, and the curtailment of identity and citizenship. In this case, each phase appeared as deprivation of land, migration to Japan and the crises of security, and the loss of nationality during the Cold War era. The last part of the essay concerns unpredictable connections between colonial modernities. Though separately formed in the transatlantic and transpacific regions, these modernities create crosscurrents of thought, struggles, defeats and victories: conjunctures. Published in the early 1950s, the writings of Martin Carter and C. L. R. James differently refer to the Korean War. By comparing their work, this essay concludes that the future of solidarity comes from ‘the ability to be exposed’. As Hall unexpectedly encountered the Caribbean migrants in London in the key moments of his memoir, such conjunctural translation was undertaken by the Caribbean intellectuals of the 1950s. To expose oneself to these unexpected encounters is the very momentum that urges us to be vigilant to the dangers of literal translation.

Shameful Specters: Remembering Spanish Slavery in Àngels Aymar’s La Indiana

Abstract This article reveals a new figure in the contemporary Spanish imaginary, the indiana, and a new literary mode, the indiana melodrama. It argues that the incarnation of the indiana as a virtuous, melodramatic heroine in Àngels Aymar’s 2007 play La indiana rebukes Spanish participation in transatlantic slavery and counters the historical amnesia that Spanish culture frequently displays toward its colonial past. An early forerunner in Spain’s long-delayed path to recognizing its history of slavery, La indiana forms part of activist efforts in Catalonia, the autonomous community in which the play premiered. Applying theories of memory and melodrama, the article explains how many factors in the play—the actors, their voices, the stage space, the soundscape, and the mixing of the Catalan and Spanish languages—transmit memory across racial, temporal, and spatial boundaries. This effect, “theatrical postmemory,” minimizes the distance between past and present, Cuba and Catalonia, memory and history. The article focuses on Aymar’s transformation of two symbols of Spanish (post)imperial nostalgia, the indiano home and the Catalan habanera, a popular musical genre. La indiana deconstructs the melodramatic convention of a happy ending and the concomitant restoration of innocence.

Robert Bernasconi and the challenges of a Critical Philosophy of Race: (Un)learning to read and teach the history of moral philosophy

This essay is an attempt to determine what Robert Bernasconi’s body of work in Critical Philosophy of Race can teach us about the way in which we, philosophers and professors of philosophy, ought to treat our institutional heritage. What should we make, for instance, of moral claims made by philosophers of the modern era who – tacitly or explicitly – manifested certain levels of endorsement toward the Atlantic Slave Trade? How should we comprehend the conceptual tools that we have inherited from them, knowing that those were formulated alongside justificatory claims for the enslavement of Africans – claims that we now deem undoubtably and universally immoral? I extract from Bernasconi’s writings an implicit methodology that can be broken down into three main moves: (1) a historiographical work, akin to Michel Foucault’s ‘archaeological’ method, aimed at uncovering the material conditions that allowed for the emergence of philosophical ideas of the past, (2) a dialectical work aimed at interpreting this collection of historical data through the critical lens of race, and (3) a pedagogical work aimed at transforming the practice of academic philosophy in light of the critique. I conclude that his methodological contribution culminates in an invitation to revisit and transform the past of the institution by treating the history of academic philosophy as philosophically and conceptually relevant rather than merely incidental. Such a commitment toward critically engaging the past of our institution urges us to revisit the canon in specific ways.

Augmenting the availability of historical GDP per capita estimates through machine learning

Can we use data on the biographies of historical figures to estimate the GDP per capita of countries and regions? Here, we introduce a machine learning method to estimate the GDP per capita of dozens of countries and hundreds of regions in Europe and North America for the past seven centuries starting from data on the places of birth, death, and occupations of hundreds of thousands of historical figures. We build an elastic net regression model to perform feature selection and generate out-of-sample estimates that explain 90% of the variance in known historical income levels. We use this model to generate GDP per capita estimates for countries, regions, and time periods for which these data are not available and externally validate our estimates by comparing them with four proxies of economic output: urbanization rates in the past 500 y, body height in the 18th century, well-being in 1850, and church building activity in the 14th and 15th century. Additionally, we show our estimates reproduce the well-known reversal of fortune between southwestern and northwestern Europe between 1300 and 1800 and find this is largely driven by countries and regions engaged in Atlantic trade. These findings validate the use of fine-grained biographical data as a method to augment historical GDP per capita estimates. We publish our estimates with CI together with all collected source data in a comprehensive dataset.

The Politics of a Portrait: Biopics, Slavery and Contemporary Racial Politics in the United States

The article examines the connection between the past and the present, and between the personal and the political, in three recent biographical pictures directed by filmmakers of color: The Birth of a Nation (2016, dir. Nate Parker), Harriet (2018, dir. Kasi Lemmons), and Emancipation (2022, dir. Antoine Fuqua). By addressing the history of American slavery, the films not only come into a dialogue with the preexisting representations of slavery in music, photography and cinema, but also reflect on current racial politics and antiracist activism in the United States. They offer a commentary on changing attitudes towards the issue of race in America, and engage with the collective memory of slavery - a past trauma, which has shaped the African American identity.

CORRECTING MODEL MISSPECIFICATION IN RELATIONSHIP ESTIMATES.

The datasets of large genotyping biobanks and direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies contain many related individuals. Until now, it has been widely accepted that the most distant relationships that can be detected are around fifteen degrees (approximately 8 th cousins) and that practical relationship estimates have a ceiling around ten degrees (approximately 5 th cousins). However, we show that these assumptions are incorrect and that they are due to a misapplication of relationship estimators. In particular, relationship estimators are applied almost exclusively to putative relatives who have been identified because they share detectable tracts of DNA identically by descent (IBD). However, no existing relationship estimator conditions on the event that two individuals share at least one detectable segment of IBD anywhere in the genome. As a result, the relationship estimates obtained using existing estimators are dramatically biased for distant relationships, inferring all sufficiently distant relationships to be around ten degrees regardless of the depth of the true relationship. Existing relationship estimators are derived under a model that assumes that each pair of related individuals shares a single common ancestor (or mating pair of ancestors). This model breaks down for relationships beyond 10 generations in the past because individuals share many thousands of cryptic common ancestors due to pedigree collapse. We first derive a corrected likelihood that conditions on the event that at least one segment is observed between a pair of putative relatives and we demonstrate that the corrected likelihood largely eliminates the bias in estimates of pairwise relationships and provides a more accurate characterization of the uncertainty in these estimates. We then reformulate the relationship inference problem to account for the fact that individuals share many common ancestors, not just one. We demonstrate that the most distant relationship that can be inferred using IBD may be 200 degrees or more, rather than ten, extending the time-to-common ancestor from approximately 300 years in the past to approximately 3,000 years in the past or more. This dramatic increase in the range of relationship estimators makes it possible to infer relationships whose common ancestors lived before historical events such as European settlement of the Americas, the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.

Deconstructing a National Hero: The Changing Representation of the Prussian Sailor and Slave Trader Joachim Nettelbeck, 1807 to Present

Abstract: Joachim Nettelbeck (1738–1824) was a Prussian sailor who worked as a first mate on Dutch slavers, lobbied with three Prussian kings for the acquisition of overseas colonies, and became famous when his hometown Kolberg was under siege by Napoleonic troops in 1807. This article traces the heroization of Nettelbeck during the past two centuries and analyzes how this representation faced eventual crisis. After providing an account of Nettelbeck's biography, it examines how Nettelbeck was made a national hero and how his participation in the transatlantic slave trade was repressed in this process. Finally, it describes how decolonial civil society initiatives have shifted the public perception of Nettelbeck since 2008.

The Haunting of the Antebellum South: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate as a Gothic Memory Archive

In Appropriate (2014), Branden Jacobs-Jenkins unearths the buried horror of the antebellum South by crafting a story about the white, dysfunctional Lafayettes, who visit their family house in Arkansas for an estate sale. In the process, they discover the secret of their deceased patriarch – that he collected photos and body parts of lynched Black men and women as souvenirs. Following the trend established by American Gothic scholars who read the American house as a metonym for the United States and its haunting entanglement with slavery, this article explores how Appropriate uses specific traits of the genre to critique its racialized conventions, particularly the portrayal of slavery as the haunting “dark” guilt of the past. I read the Lafayette family’s collective obsession with lynched body parts across three generations as a form of Gothic doubling. Furthermore, I explore how Jacobs-Jenkins reveals the Gothic horror of the past through the trope of the unseen and repressed Other – mainly through the sound of cicadas – which emphasizes the dismembered body in active pain rather than frozen and preserved in time. Through these interventions, Jacobs-Jenkins disturbs buried and repressed discourses about transatlantic slavery and white supremacy that still haunt the United States today.

German (post)colonialism: Archiving, collecting, exhibiting and repatriating Pacific cultures, a conversation

ABSTRACT In Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (2019) Ariella Azoulay highlights how histories of slavery and colonialism and the acquiring, taking, stealing and looting of artefacts from people and communities around the world by Western imperial actors are often two sides of the same coin. This conversation brings together scholars and curators to address these intricate and entangled histories and their legacies in the context of the German presence in the Pacific. Pia Wiegmink, a scholar of transatlantic slavery, interviews Emma Christopher, an Australian historian currently working on a database project to document “blackbirding” in the Pacific, Oliver Lueb, a German curator of an Oceania collection in a German museum, and Imelda Miller, an Australian South Sea Islander curator working with collections and archaeological sites in Queensland, Australia.

Seeing culture from below: Counter‐curating, counter‐ethnography, counter‐mapping

AbstractThis paper reflects on our mapping and database project britishmonumentsrelatedtoslavery.net, the first and currently most complete account of British representational public monuments related to British transatlantic slavery. It reproduces our headline findings and presents some new maps of the data. However, our main focus in this paper is on placing our project in a wider context of emergent practices and methods that inspired us. First, we note the exponential historical emergence of three connected critical, grassroots ‘counter’ practices across different institutions: of mapping, curating, and ethnography. We frame their critical commonality in their ‘counter’ approach to the nexus of what Benedict Anderson identified as three key ‘institutions of power … census, map, museum’, which have been central to conceiving and executing policy. Second, we prospectively identify some of the common structural causes that underlie this emergent assembly of instituent knowledge‐making practices from below.

Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South, by David Silkenat

<i>Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South</i>, by David Silkenat

Critical Decades: Textiles and Material Culture in Jane Eyre and Three Recent Adaptations

This paper discusses the social commentary of textile production as revealed in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and three recent adaptations. First, I focus on Rosamond Oliver’s deceptively offhand allusion to the Luddite riots of 1812 to argue that Brontë sets her novel in the 1810s during the upheavals impacting the textile industries of the East Midlands, Yorkshire and the North West regions. This setting coupled with textual allusions to early nineteenth-century fashions are used to connect the female characters’ dress in Jane Eyre to local and global labour issues, colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. I then turn to the visual representation of textiles in the intermedial adaptations of Jane Eyre by Robert Young (1997), Susanna White (2006) and Cary Fukunaga (2011), which by visually highlighting the material culture of the 1830s and 1840s, move Brontë’s narrative from the late Georgian to the early Victorian era. These adaptations overwrite the novel’s allusions to early nineteenth-century debates on industrialisation, colonialism and human enslavement in order to privilege its mid-nineteenth-century feminist critique of British marriage laws.

Henrietta Howard: mistress, survivor, imperialist?

ABSTRACT Traditionally, Henrietta Howard has been seen through the lens of her role as George II's mistress and a ‘woman of reason’ who was connected to the leading men of her day. More recently, Henrietta Howard has been reinterpreted as a minor feminist icon: a survivor, who overcame childhood tragedy, an abusive marriage, and the patriarchal system to become a leading cultural patron, living in comfort at the home she built, Marble Hill. This article seeks to situate Henrietta as a beneficiary of, and participant in, imperial activity and exchange. Today these two interpretations - Henrietta as ‘survivor’ and Henrietta as ‘imperialist’;- feel at odds with one another. Present-day attitudes mean that a feel-good, ‘girlboss’; feminist narrative about Henrietta’s life, does not sit easily with the fact that she benefitted from transatlantic slavery. However, I argue the two readings can be reconciled, creating a new interpretation, when we consider that it was through imperial activity that Georgian women such as Henrietta Howard were able to materially benefit, survive and even thrive.

The Influence of African Heritage on Afro-American Literary Expression

This research paper explores the profound influence of African heritage on Afro-American literary expression. It begins by examining the historical context, emphasizing the impact of the transatlantic slave trade and early Afro-American literature's retention of African cultural elements. The Harlem Renaissance is highlighted as a pivotal moment that celebrated African roots and set the stage for future literary developments. Central themes derived from African heritage, such as resistance, resilience, and connection to ancestry, are analyzed, illustrating their prominence in both historical and contemporary works. The paper deal with storytelling techniques and narrative structures influenced by African oral traditions, folktales, and myths, highlighting how these elements enrich Afro-American literature. The use of rhythmic language, communal narration, and the call- and-response pattern are discussed as significant aspects that enhance narrative depth and cultural authenticity. The integration of African symbols, music, and communal values as cultural motifs is explored, showcasing how these elements infuse literary works with layers of meaning and cultural resonance. The reclamation of African identity is a key focus, with discussions on Afrocentric perspectives in modern literature, the impact of the Black Arts Movement, and contemporary literary movements. The challenges and opportunities of navigating dual heritage and cultural hybridity are addressed, emphasizing the complexities of identity formation and cultural expression.

Liquor Rations and Labour Management in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

Abstract A striking yet underexamined system of labour management circulated between land and sea in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world: the use of liquor rations to stimulate worker productivity. Turning to the British naval warship and the American slave plantation, this article depicts how labour supervisors in both settings relied on carefully regulated quantities of alcohol to extract more labour from their workforces. Even as Anglo-American temperance activists called for sobering up the working classes, many naval commanders and slaveholders held firm to the belief that managed intemperance was an essential tool for mobilizing workers. The study of liquor rations and the arguments endorsing their distribution helps to reveal how a spectrum of coercive labour practices swept through the Atlantic world amid the emergence of an industrial capitalist order. Zooming in on the history of these rations enables us to discern labour extraction strategies that operated between the poles of violent coercion and market-based exploitation, and that animated vital sectors of the Atlantic economy during the nineteenth century.

Reclaiming History: The Role of Memory in Afro-American Literature

This research explores the pivotal role of memory in Afro-American literature, focusing on its multifaceted functions as a tool of resistance, cultural preservation, and historical reinterpretation. Memory in Afro-American literature emerges as a dynamic force that not only documents personal and collective experiences but also challenges dominant narratives of oppression and erasure. Through a nuanced examination of literary works spanning from slave narratives such as Frederick Douglass' "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave" (1845) to contemporary novels like Toni Morrison's "Beloved" (1987), this study illuminates how memory serves as a means of reclaiming agency and identity amidst historical trauma.The research discusses critiques of relying on memory in literature, acknowledging concerns about subjectivity and historical accuracy. It argues that memory in Afro-American literature transcends mere recollection, offering profound insights into the complexities of African American experiences and histories. By exploring examples such as Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God" (1937) and James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time" (1963), the study demonstrates how Afro-American authors use memory to confront systemic injustices, preserve cultural heritage, and inspire social activism.Ultimately, Afro-American literature's enduring legacy lies in its ability to reshape historical narratives through the transformative power of memory. By interrogating memory's intersections with literature and activism, this research invites readers to engage critically with the past and envision a future grounded in truth, empathy, and reconciliation. Through its exploration of memory's role in shaping identity, justice, and cultural resilience, Afro-American literature continues to provoke thought and inspire meaningful dialogue on the enduring legacies of slavery, segregation, and the ongoing quest for equality.

The Rise of Decolonial Image: Postcolonial Reading to Django Unchained Movie by Quentin Tarantino

This paper provides postcolonial analysis of Django Unchained movie which is written and directed by American Film writer Quentin Tarantino in 2012. More specifically, the analysis focused on three primary components: firstly, Quentin Tarantino’s critique for slavery of blacks and racial discrimination, secondly, Orientalized Oriental discourse via postcolonial lens, and thirdly, decolonization discourse which is represented by Django, the protagonist of the movie. Throughout the movie, the viewers can see many scenes of slavery and racial intolerance which reflects many historical facts in the era of American slavery; including how blacks were obliged to work and how they were treated inhumanely. In a similar vein, the viewer can see the spirit of Orientalized Oriental phenomenon through Stephen as one of the major actors of the movie who embodies the phenomenon which supported abusing with blacks although he is a black actor. Quentin Tarantino gives a spectacular role to Django who becomes a symbolic emancipation of blacks and earns his freedom and frees his wife, Broomhilda. Postcolonial critics react against the imperial history of colonization, like the structure of racism as well as colonial power which reshaped itself by Orientalized Oriental discourse. After all, Django Unchained Movie contributes to the discourse of postcolonialism in which Quentin Tarantino reveals some historical facts about African American slavery, and in contrast to many other Film Makers, he gives a good role to non-European hero, Django.

Continuities between the slave trade, “legitimate” commerce, and the Serviçal trade: a look at four families in Angola in the mid- to late nineteenth century

ABSTRACT Using archival sources, baptismal records, obituaries, travellers’ accounts, newspapers and Luanda’s weekly gazette the Boletim Oficial do Governo Geral da Província de Angola, this paper explores the participation of Angola’s slave-trading elite in “legitimate” commerce and the serviçal trade. Specifically, it focuses on the families of four prominent slave traders: Dona Ana Joaquina dos Santos Silva, José Maria Matoso de Andrade da Câmara, José Maria do Prado, and Francisco de Salles Ferreira. Using micro-history as a tool of analysis, this paper demonstrates that some elites and their families were able to use profits from the transatlantic slave trade to weather the transition to “legitimate” commerce and indentured labour. In turn, it challenges the “crisis of adaptation” theory and highlights the role that familial wealth from the transatlantic slave trade played in the later part of the nineteenth century.