Transatlantic Studies, Atlantic Studies, Slavery

Drummers for the Devil? The Black Soldiers of the 29th (Worcestershire) Regiment of Foot, 1759-1843.
By JD. Ellis.
JSAHR. Eighty. Autumn 2002. No.323. Pages 186-202.
This article explores the employment of soldiers of African and Asian origin as enlisted drummers by one British infantry regiment from the 1750s to the 1840s.

L'article traite de littérature de voyage et plus particulièrement de récits de               
missionnaires italiens de l'ordre des Capucins, ayant œuvré à l'évangélisation du           
Royaume du Congo vers la fin du XVII e siècle. Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Mon-tecuccolo, Girolamo Merolla da Sorrento et Antonio Zucchelli da Gradisca ont un point commun, celui d'avoir reporté dans leurs livres respectifs, des manifestations d'apriorismes, de violences à l'encontre des us et coutumes congolais. L'étude en offre les détails littéraires traduisant ces répressions et leurs surgissements. Sur le fond, elle marque une distinction entre une narration découlant d'une violence réelle, celle de spectacles punitifs, et une autre, imagologico-morale , exprimée en châtiments exemplaires.
The objective of this research is to investigate about travel literature, particularly on the travel accounts written by the Capuchin missionaries Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo, Girolamo Merolla da Sorrento and Antonio Zucchelli da Gradisca, who participated in the Evangelization of the Kingdom of Congo in the late seventeenth century. Their texts are characterized by the recurrence to apriorisms and the use of violence toward Congolese traditions and customs. This study examines precisely the literary motifs that represents the above mentioned characteristics and, simultaneously, establishes the causes of their origin, through the distinction between narrative as a result of the real violence represented in the punitive spectacles and a imagological-moral violence, expressed through exemplary punishments.

Sarah Parker Remond (1826–1894) left the free black community of Salem, Massachusetts, where she was born, to become one of the first women to travel on extensive lecture tours across the United Kingdom. Remond eventually moved to Florence, Italy, where she earned a degree at one of Europe’s most prestigious medical schools. Her language skills enabled her to join elite salons in Florence and Rome, where she entertained high society with musical soirees even while maintaining connections to European emancipation movements.

Remond’s extensive travels and diverse acquaintances demonstrate that the nineteenth-century grand tour of Europe was not exclusively the privilege of white intellectuals but included African American travelers, among them women. This biography, based on international archival research, tells the fascinating story of how Remond forged a radical path, establishing relationships with fellow activists, artists, and intellectuals across Europe.

Libro de divulgación y conmemorativo por la designación de la Ciudad de Veracruz, San Juan de Ulúa y Yanga como sitios de la Memoria de la Esclavitud, de las poblaciones africanas y afrodescendientes.
Esta publicación forma parte del programa internacional de la UNESCO y el INAH-México “La ruta del esclavo” en el marco del decenio de los Afrodescendientes.

How did African slaves get to the Americas? Who was involved with the slave ship process? Slave ships went in a triangle from Europe to Africa to the Americas and back to Europe again. This was called the Transatlantic Slave Trade, also known as the Triangle Trade. The Europeans would get agricultural goods from the Americas via the slave trade. The Africans would receive weapons and cotton from the Europeans and the Americans would receive slaves from Africa.  The Transatlantic Slave Trade is infamous for its laziness and greed that caused more than 12 million innocent people to lose their homes and more than 2 million to die.

Between the Kola Forest and the Salty Sea reveals the long-hidden story of those who lived in the region before Liberia was created.

Here are a few of the inspiring revelations it contains:

• The different languages and ethnic groups in Liberia share a common root.
• The barkless hunting dog found in Liberian villages were a favorite pet of Ancient Egyptian pharaohs.
• Kola - once used as an ingredient in soft drinks - was discovered by the ancestors of Liberians.
• Early European explorers learned from early Liberian seafarers how to navigate some dangerous currents and winds of the Atlantic Ocean.
• Rice growers from West African's "Grain Coast" helped teach Americans how to grow rice. Today, the United States exports rice to West Africa, including Liberia.

Between the Kola Forest and the Salty Sea took 30 years of research and uses documents first published in Arabic, Portuguese, Spanish and French. It draws on oral traditions, archaeological digs, historical linguistics, studies of cultural patterns embedded in masks and other forms of material culture, regional and continental histories, and even biological anthropology.

Just as West African farmers burn a field to remove weeds, Between the Kola Forest and the Salty Sea demolishes many negative stereotypes. For centuries, African cultures have been portrayed as "strange," "weird," even "evil" through the use of words like "fetish," "witch," and "country devil."

This book will change Liberian history - and Liberians - for good!

This article was published in The Irish Sword, Vol. XXIII. No. 94. Winter 2003.
It utilised the service records of fifty Black soldiers who served as enlisted military musicians (bandsmen, drummers and trumpeters), in the Irish regiments of the British Army, enlisted in Ireland or served in Ireland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Since the article was published many more Black soldiers have been found with links to Ireland.

Outline of a previously undetected transatlantic racial discourse that I have dubbed "Mandingo-Saxonism," which attributes to the Mandingo ethnic group of West Africa most of the character traits which the discourse of Saxonism claims are the sole possession of Saxons (British and their American cousins) and which supposedly establish Saxon supremacy and justify Saxon hegemony.  The traits are pride, energy, masculinity, and intelligence.  Mandingo-Saxonism's primary rhetorical purpose has been to explain away black excellence by calling it a fluke possessed by a rare racial sub-group.  I have traced the discourse from eighteenth century explorer, slaveholder, and colonial texts through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and right up to present day culture, of which Quentin Tarrantino's film Django Unchained is the most famous recent example.  This conference presentation at SUNY Binghamton in 2014 was my first attempt to articulate this nascent discovery to a public audience.

A website for California teachers notes that mission Indians were slaves, citing Lorenzo Asisara's story as evidence.  Asisara's story of his father's whipping at a mission does call to mind the humiliation of slavery. Yet whatever mission Indians were, they were not slaves--if only because Indians were not property and African slaves were.  The Spanish manipulated Indians through their tie to the land, as opposed to Africans, who were uprooted from their lands in the process of slavery. This essay examines 1769 to 1810 to identify key characteristics of mission Indian status.

Abdou Kadir Sankanu, the sitting Alkalo (ruler) of Sotuma Sere and patriarch of the 'Sankanu Kaggoro' dynasty in the Jimara district of the Upper River Region (URR) of The Gambia said that the recent detention of six (6) young people from his community by the police from Basse was a result of youth exuberance and disregard for customary dispute resolution mechanism and not caste dispute. The Alkalo who was speaking to both academic and popular audiences on Tuesday, 14 th March 2022 said he was surprised that these days every small misunderstanding among Sarahulleh people is exaggerated across various spheres as caste dispute. "There are about 54 Sarahulleh settlements in The Gambia. Though they share a common language, they have various forms of social stratifications and customary administrations. It is therefore wrong to penalize all Sarahulleh communities as backward slavery-promoting settlements. We at Sotuma Sere Sankanu are enlightened people of the books and law and order. In regulating our affairs, we rely on the 1997 Constitution of The Gambia especially section 7(e) on customary law, decisions of the Traditional Council of Elders of our 'House of Sankanura', relevant aspects of the Islamic Sharia, the 'Kurukan Fugan Mandeng Charter' of 1235-36 which was inscribed in 2009 by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity and, the progressive opinions of our wise sons and daughters." Abdou Kadiri Sankanu explained.

This thesis demonstrates the continuation of slave importation at the Cape during the early British rule, when the slave trade was regulated, then outlawed (1807), from 1797 to 1818.  Appendices I and II provide a useful and painstakingly researched dataset of the slave trade (1797-1822).  This thesis is a valuable resource to students of the Indian Ocean slave trade. The author has vastly extended his original dataset, to cover slave traffic passing the Cape during the period 1644-1860. Portions of the dataset are available upon request.

28. « Kotti Sree Ramesh et Kandula Nirupa Rani. Claude McKay : The Literary Identity from Jamaica to Harlem and Beyond. Jefferson, McFarland, 2006, 208 p.  » Annales, Histoire, Sciences Sociales. « Identités ». 64e année, n°6, Paris, Editions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, novembre-décembre 2009, p. 1442-1444 [http://www.cairn.info/revue-annales-2009-6-page-1389.htm - pa231].

This article focuses on the presence and commercial dominance of Brazilian-born agents in Benguela, in West Central Africa.  In this study I stress the central role of Brazilian-born individuals in sustaining the slave trade that in many ways excluded Portugal’s control. My interest is in their participation in the organization and supply of the slave trade on the coast of Africa, emphasizing the bilateral connections between important ports in the South Atlantic world that constrained Portuguese metropolitan power. Brazilian-born agents played crucial roles in slave trade organization, exports, and implementation of the colonial administration. This case also shows that cultural exchanges did not occur solely from Africa to the Americas; people, crops, and ideas also migrated from west to east, transforming life in Benguela.

This article analyzes how women—as wives, mothers, and plantation managers—participated in making Jamaica the largest slaveholding colony in the Anglo-Atlantic world. Free and freed women bought, sold, and subjected slaves to brutal punishments. They derived considerable social power and material benefits from slave ownership. [appeared as Chapter Six in "Women in Early America: Transnational Histories, Rethinking Master Narratives," ed. Thomas Foster (New York: NYU Press, 2015): 160-181]

Em outubro de 1853, Joaquim de Paula Guedes Alcoforado entregara, à pedido das forças de repressão, instigante relatório sobre as atividades do comércio de africanos na ilegalidade no período aberto com a lei de 7 de novembro de 1831. Traficante redimido, Alcoforado conhecia os meandros do tráfico, sobretudo, as redes e as estruturas de desembarques montadas no litoral que seguia dos Campos dos Goitacazes à serra do mar, entre os limites das províncias do Rio de Janeiro e de São Paulo. Ano a ano, entre 1831 e 1853, foram descritos os desembarques mais notórios, os sujeitos envolvidos no ilícito trato, e os novos pontos de desembarques, montados meticulosamente nas praias antes desertas dos municípios litorâneos do Império.
Apesar de muito conhecido, o relato comprometedor de Alcoforado passou quase incólume nos últimos anos.  Disponível no The National Arquives, antigo Public Record Office, na capital do Reino Unido; transcrito pelo Arquivo Nacional brasileiro; citado em publicações clássicas na década de 1960, como no livro de José Honório Rodrigues, “Brasil e África: outros horizontes” de 1964; e mesmo publicado, ainda que não integralmente, em revista acadêmica de prestígio em meados dos anos 1990, os casos, os nomes e os lugares evidenciados por Alcoforado não se transformaram em objeto de pesquisa, salvo no trabalho ainda inédito de Roquinaldo Ferreira de 1996. Da tessitura do relatório, em outubro de 1853, até os nossos dias, a delação de Alcoforado cumpriu seu papel junto às autoridades de repressão, mas seguiu na penumbra para os historiadores do século XXI.
Sendo assim, transformaremos alguns dos informes fornecidos por Alcoforado em pontos de partida de uma pesquisa em desenvolvimento sobre os agentes e os espaços do tráfico ilegal de africanos no litoral sul da antiga província do Rio de Janeiro. No rastro dos indícios fornecidos pelo relatório de 1853, procuraremos identificar alguns dos sujeitos citados e mapear os espaços de recepção e desembarque no litoral que margeava o complexo cafeeiro fluminense. Por se tratar de pesquisa em andamento, apresentaremos os resultados preliminares em relação a alguns sujeitos e lugares do tráfico nas praias e ilhas compreendidas entre a baia de Sepetiba e o mar de Ilha Grande, no litoral sul do Rio de Janeiro.

In 2000, the United States census allowed respondents for the first time to tick a box marked “African American” in the race category. The new option marked official recognition of a term that had been gaining currency for some decades. Africa has always played a role in black identity, but it was in the tumultuous period between the two world wars that black Americans first began to embrace a modern African American identity.

Following the great migration of black southerners to northern cities after World War I, the search for roots and for meaningful affiliations became subjects of debate and display in a growing black public sphere. Throwing off the legacy of slavery and segregation, black intellectuals, activists, and organizations sought a prouder past in ancient Egypt and forged links to contemporary Africa. In plays, pageants, dance, music, film, literature, and the visual arts, they aimed to give stature and solidity to the American black community through a new awareness of the African past and the international black world. Their consciousness of a dual identity anticipated the hyphenated identities of new immigrants in the years after World War II, and an emerging sense of what it means to be a modern American.

Winner, 2010 Biennial Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for First Book of History

Commended, 2010 W. K. Hancock Prize, Australian Historical Association (one of two books shortlisted)

Shortlisted, 2009 NSW Premier’s General History Prize (one of four books shortlisted)

Choice (magazine of the American Library Association), “Outstanding Academic Title,” 2009

The liberalisation of the slave trade in the Spanish Caribbean ended with a series of political measures which aimed to revitalise the practice of slavery in the region. After granting a series of monopoly contracts (asientos) to merchant houses based in other western European nations to supply slaves to Spanish America, the Spanish monarchy decided to liberalise import mechanisms. These reforms turned Cuba, especially Havana, into the most important slave trade hub within the Spanish Caribbean. Havana was connected with both Atlantic and inter-colonial trade networks, while other authorised ports imported slaves from other Caribbean territories; Spanish, British, Dutch, Danish and American traders all participated in this trade, and slave trafficking became the most profitable form of commerce in the region during this period.

This volume examines Scotland's experience of and reaction to European expansion between c. 1600-1800. Although Scotland lacked an independent empire in the seventeenth century, it gained unfettered access to the global empire of England after 1707. The volume argues that, beneath this seemingly stark discontinuity, there lay considerable continuity. Using a series of case studies on Scottish governors serving in the empires of Denmark-Norway, Weden, and their eighteenth century Russian and British equivalents, it highlights the previously underestimated chronological and geographic extent of Scotland's engagement in European expansion. It concludes that a blend of informal networks of kinship and local association complemented the official status of Scottish governors and produced a relatively distinctive and effective strategy for participating in imperialism.

Artículo divulgativo sobre el contenido de unos documentos muy-muy poco conocidos relacionados con la primera rebelión antiesclavista negra de América, ocurrida en la colonia La Española en diciembre de 1521 e iniciada en el ingenio o plantación azucarera del entonces gobernador de La Española y virrey de las Indias Diego Colón, hijo de Cristóbal Colón.  El autor los “descubrió” en diciembre de 2021, justamente cuando se cumplía el quinto centenario de la insurrección, en el Portal de Archivos Españoles (PARES), banco de documentos en línea del Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte de España. 
Como fuente histórica, estos documentos nos aportan voces individuales de algunos de los protagonistas directos de los acontecimientos relacionados con la insurrección, aunque en este caso se trata solamente de individuos del bando de los esclavistas y perseguidores de los esclavos sublevados. Junto al ensayo se incluye como apéndice la transcripción de una petición-relación de méritos de uno de los participantes, una probanza-cuestionario de testigos que compiló para respaldar su solicitud de “merced”, y los testimonios de otros tres participantes, todos producidos en Santo Domingo en el año 1532

When Johan Maurits of Nassau, Governor-General of Dutch Brazil (1630-54), sent out expeditions against the maroons of Palmares, he was informed by his intelligence officers that the inhabitants followed the “Portuguese religion,” that they had erected a church in the capital, that there were chapels with images of saints and the Virgin Mary and that Zumbi, the king of Palmares, did not allow the presence of “fetishists.” Portuguese sources confirm that Palmares had a priest who baptized children and married couples and that its inhabitants followed Catholic rite, although according to Governor Francisco de Brito, they did so “in a stupid fashion.” Many more examples of the existence of Afro-Catholic elements in maroon communities in Latin America can be found. They question the widespread assumption that Catholicism had been forced upon all African slaves and that, even among those who seemingly embraced the colonizer’s faith, it functioned merely as a veneer underneath which their truly African, indigenous beliefs remained hidden. As the case of Palmares indicates, slaves did not necessarily wish to liberate themselves from all “Catholic ballast” once they ran away but sometimes remained strongly attached to it. 
This conclusion corresponds to the assumption by the Brazilian historian Marina de Mello e Souza that upon arrival in the Americas, many slaves did not perceive Catholic elements as something foreign since “Catholicism represented a link to their native Africa.” Souza is but one of several scholars who in recent years contributed to a shift in the study of black performance culture in the New World. The new paradigm essentially consists in the acknowledgment that our understanding of black performance culture can be bettered if we take into consideration that many Africans had already adopted certain European—predominantly Portuguese—cultural and religious elements before they were shipped as slaves to the Americas.
In the context of this shift, there has been an increased interest in Afro-Iberian brotherhoods (irmandades/hermandades) and confraternities (confrarias/cofradías). While it was long assumed that these so-called “black brotherhoods” were associated with slave culture on the Iberian Peninsula and in Latin America only, it can now be confirmed that Afro-Catholic fraternities also flourished in parts of Africa during the Atlantic slave trade era. As Linda Heywood has argued, “many Kongos and not a few Angolans had been Christians before their enslavement in Brazil. Thus they would have been familiar with the brotherhoods in Luanda, Soyo, and Kongo, and the central role they played in the creole society of Kongo, Angola and São Tomé.” Nicole von Germeten’s research on black brotherhoods in Mexico also concluded that “some Central Africans probably took part in social and religious brotherhoods and sisterhoods before crossing the Atlantic.” 
Ira Berlin also observed that black brotherhoods played a crucial role in the intercontinental networks that developed in the context of the transatlantic slavery. However, like most scholars, Berlin perceives brotherhoods as an essentially Iberian phenomenon that was crucial to the development of black identity the Iberian World, differing from North America, where “numerous informal connections between black people” developed, but not brotherhoods. Although Berlin confirms that slaves “created an intercontinental web of cofradias … so that, by the seventeenth century, the network of black religious brotherhoods stretched from Lisbon to São Tomé, Angola, and Brazil,” he believes that those slaves who ended up in Dutch, French or English colonies refrained from developing brotherhoods since there were no “comparable institutional linkages” that allowed them to do so. Berlin’s assumption thus presupposes that brotherhoods could only be established with institutional support and excludes the possibility that slaves themselves may have taken the initiative to create such organizations.
This article questions this conclusion and explores the possibility that slave organizations modeled upon Iberian brotherhoods have existed in North America. In doing so, it follows a reasoning by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matt Childs and James Sidbury, editors of The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade (2013), according to whom “approved institutional structures authorized by the Catholic Church were not always necessary for Africans and their descendants to build fraternal structures.”  A first section provides an overview of the characteristics of Afro-Iberian slave brotherhoods. The following section presents a comparative analysis between king celebrations in Afro-Iberian brotherhoods and those at African-American Election Day and Pinkster festivals in New England and New York. The article ends with a reflection on the origins of Afro-Iberian cultural and religious elements among slave communities outside of the Iberian realm in the American diaspora.

Dos de los tambores ñáñigos (ekué y bonkó enchemiyá), expuestos hoy en la Sala de América del Museo Nacional de Antropología, son objetos rituales incautados a la sociedad secreta Abakuá en Cuba. Su itinerario hasta el Museo Biblioteca de Ultramar de Madrid en 1889, se sitúa en un contexto social y político en los años previos a la independencia cubana, con detenciones, incautaciones y deportaciones de los denominados entonces ñáñigos (miembros de la sociedad Abakuá). Su exhibición en el museo en esos años tuvo consecuencias en los futuros estudios académicos que se han realizado sobre esta asociación religiosa afrocubana hasta hoy. La sociedad Abakuá recrea la sociedad Ekpe de Calabar (Nigeria/Camerún) llevada a Cuba por los esclavos carabalí. Muchos deportados ñáñigos llevaron de vuelta esta memoria africana a Fernando Poo (Guinea Ecuatorial). Iniciamos una reflexión sobre la aportación desde Calabar del grupo ndowe, con subgrupos étnicos en Guinea Ecuatorial, Camerún y Gabón, en un complejo entramado de trayectorias en el Atlántico negro.

The two drums of the Ñáñigos (the ekué and the bonkó enchemiyá), exposed in the America Hall of the Museo Nacional de Antropología are ritual objects seized from the secret society Abakuá in Cuba. The itinerary to the Museo Biblioteca de Ultramar in 1889 in Madrid is situated in a social and political context in the years before the Cuban independence, with arrests, seizures and deportations of so-called Ñáñigos (members of Abakuá society). Their exhibition at this Museum at that time had an impact on future academic studies that have been done about this Afro-Cuban religious association until nowadays. The Abakuá secret society has recreated the Ekpe society in Calabar (Nigeria / Cameroon) brought to Cuba by Calabar slaves. Many Ñáñigos deportees brought back this memory to Africa to the island of Fernando Poo (Equatorial Guinea). We started a reflection on the contribution from Calabar to Cuba from the Ndowe group, a community with ethnic subgroups in Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon and Gabon in a complex network of paths on the Black Atlantic.

Black stardom is a burgeoning field, and the fame of formerly enslaved African Americans in Britain during the mid nineteenth century offers an intriguing case study. In 1846, one British newspaper described the ex-slave turned abolitionist Frederick Douglass as a 'Negro Hercules'. During his British sojourn, Douglass travelled thousands of miles from Exeter to Edinburgh and contemporary newspapers waxed lyrical about his commanding stage presence and 'eloquent' lectures. Douglass created a sensation in Britain, and his celebrity rested on his status as a formerly enslaved individual, his powerful oratory and strong, commanding physical presence, as well as his talent at influencing and exploiting contemporary debates to help the anti-slavery cause. He gave renewed vigour to tense debates over non-fellowship with slave-holding American churches and controversies such as the Evangelical Alliance had international consequences, vividly exposing the influence of American slavery on British society. I will discuss the controversies, complications and consequences of Douglass' celebrity, which provided a stepping-stone towards fame and success in America.

This article explores site-specific heritage questions of the contemporary cultural practice of festivals of jazz – a key transatlantic music form – by bringing together three areas for discussion and development: questions of slavery heritage and legacy; the location, built environment and (touristic) offer of the historic city; and the contemporary British jazz festival, its programme and the senses or silences of (historical) situatedness in the festival package. Other artistic forms, cultural practices and festivals are involved in self-reflexive efforts to confront their own pasts; such are discussed as varying processes of the decolonisation of knowledge and culture. This provides the critical and cultural context for consideration of the jazz festival in the Georgian urban centre. Preliminary analysis of relevant jazz festivals’ programmes, commissions and concerts leads to interrogating the relationship – of silence, of place – between jazz in Britain, historic or heritage locations and venues, and the degree or lack of understanding of the transatlantic slave trade. The heritage centres clearly associated with the slave trade that also have significant (jazz) festivals referred to include Bristol, Cheltenham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Hull, Lancaster, Liverpool, London, and Manchester.

Archives and historical records are central to histories of law and legality. Themes and debates in legal history have been shaped, and in some cases even determined by the availability of and access to archival sources. Despite growing critiques of archives as partial, incomplete, and uneven sites of power/ knowledge, ‘the archive’ continues to operate as a site of retrieval and recuperation in legal history. This chapter builds on and
expands the author’s earlier work on ‘law’s archive’. which explored how law writes its authority and legitimacy through a double logic of violence: the violence of law and the violence of the archive. In this chapter, this argument is reconsidered through the ocean as legal archive. Oceans productively materialize the tensions between what can be known and unknown of the past. They invite other artefacts, imaginaries, and possibilities for writing legal history, especially those of transatlantic slavery.

If you are teaching a course on the Transatlantic Slave Trade or studying this topic independently, this article introduces readers to this period, and covers primarily social, political, and economic factors behind the development and institutionalization of the Trade.  The chronology follows the 15th century up to the 19th century period of British Abolitionism.  Key figures of British and (North) American abolitionism are highlighted, such as Granville Sharpe and Anthony Benezet to illustrate transatlantic communication in the beginnings of this liberation movement, which led up to the Somerset decision.

El propósito del presente ensayo es doble. Primero, se propone examinar el texto de Evita Enoy como paradigma de lo que Mary Louise Pratt llama texto autoetnográfico que, junto con otros textos surgidos en un espacio colonial, despliega una perspectiva local que revela el espacio interior del texto como sitio de saberes impugnados, de conocimientos en disputa. Segundo, interesa ver cómo dentro de la perspectiva local, el conocimiento del espacio y la identidad, anclados en el discurso etnológico, se conjugan hasta llegar a formar un discurso de resistencia que responde a la mirada europea desde el interior del texto mismo. A través de ella se desestabilizan e interrogan formas dominantes de organización del conocimiento, es decir, la historia.

Nonostante la fama internazionale di Claudio Magris e l'indubbio impatto delle sue opere nell'italianistica mondiale, la sua produzione saggistica e narrativa non sembra avere ancora fatto breccia nella critica e nella teoria nordamericana. Questa situazione è tanto più paradossale se si considera che Magris è probabilmente il più multiculturale, il più comparatista e il più interdisciplinare degli scrittori italiani contemporanei, per tematiche e per formazione. La sua prospettiva storico-filosofica, come egli stesso sottolinea, deriva dalla cultura tedesca, ma la sua prosa, specialmente la sintassi, è rigorosamente italiana, mentre le sue vicende biografiche e letterarie sono fondate su sensazioni ed eventi che lo portano ad attraversare multipli confini.

This article presents a new perspective on the master-slave relationship in New Netherland in order to complement the existing theories on the treatment of slaves in that Dutch colony. It shows how prior to the loss of Dutch Brazil, the West India Company modeled its slave policy after Portuguese practices, such as the formation of black militias and the use of Christianity as a means to foster slave loyalty. It also points out that in the initial slave policy of the Dutch Reformed Church was characterized by the ambition to replace the Iberian Catholic Church in the Americas. While the Reformed Church in the early decades of the Dutch colonial expansion was characterized by a community-building spirit and a flexible attitude toward newcomers, the loss of Brazil shattered the dream of a Protestant American continent and gave way to a more exclusivist approach with a much stronger emphasis on orthodoxy. This led to a dramatic change in attitude vis-à-vis slaves, which is reflected in the segregationist policies―both at a social and a religious level―in later Dutch slave colonies such as Suriname.

In this article, I situate Orlando Patterson’s magnum opus, Slavery and Social Death alongside his earlier writings on slavery and slave revolts in Jamaica. To appreciate fully Patterson’s contributions to sociology, comparative historical sociology, and the wider literature on slavery, readers must engage with the full corpus of his scholarly production. By reading his body of work all together, as part of a much larger whole, social death may take on new angles, depths, and dimensions. Patterson’s previous work on slavery and slave revolts in Jamaica, I suggest, invites novel ways to read his formulations of social death while opening other archives through which to study the (after)lives of slavery.

This issue of the Anti-Trafficking Review is concerned with some of the histories that created, and that continue to shape, both the present-day phenomena discussed under the rubric of trafficking, and the contemporary discourse of trafficking itself. One such history is that of transatlantic slavery. Since the millennium, numerous NGOs have been founded in the US, Australia and Europe with a mission to end what they call ‘modern slavery’. Their campaigns have overlapped with, and played a significant role in shaping, the development of media, NGO, policy and political discourse on human trafficking, which is, according to the antislavery NGO Free the Slaves, ‘the modern day slave trade—the process of enslaving a person’.1 In this discourse, the history of transatlantic slavery is invoked by means of visual as well as textual references in order to emphasise the severity of trafficking (and other phenomena included under the umbrella of ‘modern slavery’) as a human rights violation. The message has been communicated so effectively that although in international law slavery is held to be only one of several possible outcomes of trafficking, in the anti-trafficking rhetoric emanating from national and international policy agencies, as well as NGOs, trafficking is now frequently said to be ‘modern slavery’.

This article examines the wide-ranging Scottish poetic response to eighteenth-century slavery, particularly the use of sentiment as a literary strategy designed to provoke empathetic reactions from readers. The article covers the entirety of the eighteenth-century Scottish response, ending with Robert Burns's ambiguous poetic treatments of slavery. Because Scots were intimately involved at home and abroad in the discourse and practice of the slave trade, they were well-positioned to respond to its effects. Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, derived from the works of Smith, Francis Hutcheson, and Dugald Stewart, had laid the groundwork for literary works that stressed the importance of feelings in the individual’s response to the world. Observable phenomena became not just the source of sensory impressions but served to structure and relate experiences by means of empathetic sentimental responses. These responses could guide future actions by acting to promote the relief of suffering and dissipate the stimulus to the observer’s own pain. Based on the central premise of this model—‘ev’ry heart can feel’—much Scottish poetry from the eighteenth century sought to redress the sufferings of slaves by appealing to core emotions in its audience, producing as a result a body of political writing that powerfully imagined the painful experience of slavery.