Module Directory

This module will focus on the different plantation societies that were established in Brazil, British Jamaica, the French Caribbean (mainly 'Saint-Domingue', that is, present-day Haiti) and the Spanish colony of Cuba.

The module will examine how local conditions (environment and geopolitics) and external factors (such as the demands on the world market, religion, law and customs of the colonial power, and the African cultural backgrounds of the enslaved) combined to shape the characteristics of every slave society.

The aims of this module are:

• To introduce a range of historiographical and conceptual approaches to the study of Latin American and Caribbean Slavery, ca. 1500-1888.


• To promote a deep understanding of significance of slavery to Latin American and global history.


• To encourage wider understanding of and facilitate engagement with the various types of primary sources relating to this topic.


• To develop research and writing skills.

By the end of the module, students will be expected to be able to

1. Understand the significance and importance of slavery in the colonial Atlantic world.


2. Make use of a comparative historical approach, for example to explain the different forms slavery took in the various plantation colonies in the Caribbean and Brazil.


3. Interpret primary sources that relate to one major strand of European colonialism in the Americas.


4. Use their knowledge of history to asses to what extent slavery shaped contemporary Latin American societies.

The great majority of the 13 million enslaved Africans deported to the Americas during the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries ended up working on plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean. Sugar, cacao, indigo, tobacco, cotton and coffee were the main commodities slaves produced for the rapidly expanding European markets. But slavery did not only provide crucial inputs for developing capitalism, it also entered cultural representations of the other. Enlightened writers reflected about its legitimacy or the fundamental differences between what was increasingly perceived as 'races'. Hence slavery in the Americas contributed in many ways to the making of the modern world.

Introductory lectures on each colony will be followed by comparative sessions dealing with slave-holding elites and social structure more generally, slave women and the slave family, as well as the religion and culture of the enslaved. In the last sessions we will look at runaways, plots, and rebellions and other means whereby the enslaved sought to obtain freedom. The work in class will mainly deal with documents written by travellers, priests, and government officials and, more exceptionally, by overseers and the enslaved themselves. The discussion of these primary sources will allow us to gain new insights into the everyday reality of slavery.

Introductory Reading

• Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery (2010).


• Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex (1998).


• Eltis and Engermann, The Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. 3 (2011).


• Klein and Luna, Slavery in Brazil (2010).

This module will be delivered via:

• One 1-hour lecture per week.
• One 1-hour seminar per week.