Handbook

Our world is profoundly shaped by the legacies of plantation slavery: racism, global inequality, even the patterns of exploitation that underpin contemporary unfree labour, are all entangled with the slave trade and its aftermaths. This course explores slavery and its aftermaths from 1700 to the present. It will examine the peculiar conjunction of law, greed and cruelty that underpinned eighteenth-century new world slavery; demonstrate the hardening of modern racism through efforts to end slavery and the slave trade; and explore the lasting impacts of slavery and its endings in the contemporary world.