220126 African Slavery and ‘Tropicality’ in the Americas, 1500-1888 (S) (SoSe 2024)

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, in Cuba in 1886, and in Brazil in 1888, with a quick excursion into indigenous slavery as an important precursor and 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.

Module: This seminar should ideally be studied together with the historical contextualization “Climate, Environment, and the Human Body in Early Modern Thought” (Course No. 220127), as the latter provides important contextual knowledge that will ease your understanding and work in the seminar and with the primary sources.

Requirements for participation, required level

Gute Englischkenntnisse in Wort und Schrift! Der Kurs findet komplett in Englisch statt und die Forschungsliteratur ist ebenfalls in Englisch.
Good knowledge of written and spoken English is essentail as we'll be reading English research literature and discussing in English.