220087 African Slavery and ’Tropicality’ in the Americas (S) (SoSe 2021)

Already in 1501, Spanish conquistadors began importing enslaved Africans to the Island of Hispaniola, their first colony in the – for Europeans – ‘New World’. In the course of the next few centuries, different European colonial powers successively colonized the Caribbean islands, as well as the South- and North American continents, setting up extractive plantation economies that would profit the respective European metropoles. These ‘plantation machines’ (Trevor Burnard) functioned on the basis of the massive enslavement and deportation of people from the West African coast and their forced labor under the most inhumane conditions.

This course will provide an overview over the development of the transatlantic slave trade from its beginnings to its abolishment in the United States in 1865 and in Cuba in 1886, with a quick excursion into indigenous slavery as an important precursor and/ or simultaneously occurring process besides African slavery. While looking at different regions of the Americas and at different kinds of plantation labor enslaved Africans were forced into, we will take particular note of the discourse of justification European colonial personnel employed to claim the necessity of importing enslaved Africans. From the earliest moments, climatic arguments to do with the tropical location of sugar plantations formed part of this discourse.

We will work with primary sources both, from the perspective of the enslaved as well as the enslavers in order to approach the course’s theme and focus.

Requirements for participation, required level

Willingness and ability to read and discuss texts and documents in English

Bibliography

Arnold, D. (1996). The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion. Oxford, Cambridge: Blackwell.
Borucki, A., Eltis, D., & Wheat, D. (2015). Atlantic History and the Slave Trade to Spanish America. The American Historical Review, 120(2), 433-461. doi:10.1093/ahr/120.2.433
Eltis, D. (2000). The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eltis, D., & Halbert, M. (2013). The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. Retrieved from https://www.slavevoyages.org/
Glacken, C. J. (1967). Traces on the Rhodian Shore. Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Johnson, J. M. (2020). Wicked flesh: black women, intimacy, and freedom in the Atlantic world (1st edition. ed.). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Klein, H. S., & Vinson, B. (2007). African slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (2nd ed.). Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.
Newman, B. N. (2018). A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.