Events - JCMML
What can microhistory reveal that Big History cannot? Drawing on studies of enslaved and free people in revolutionary and abolitionist France, Sue Peabody explores how focusing on individual subaltern lives reshapes historians’ questions and uncovers new perspectives within the imperial archive.
What is Black Event Theory (BET)? This opening lecture introduces BET from the ground up: its philosophical foundations, its departure from conventional ontology, and its insistence that Blackness is not a problem to be solved but a structure of being to be thought. Beginning with the temporal rupture at the heart of The Door of No Return: Being-as-Black, and an ambition to respond to the thinking of Toni Morrison, we establish the tripartite framework of Cognition, Consciousness, and Being that organizes the theory before asking what it means to originate a philosophical system from the site of the Middle Passage rather than from the traditions that sought to make the world before it unthinkable.
How does the Devadasi tradition stay active despite being declared illegal in India? In his lecture, Indranil Acharya will explore the inescapable dependency of the Devadasis on the temple priests, patrons or the influential members of their own community.
Is it true that Global Value Chains (GVCs) 'boost incomes, create better jobs, and reduce poverty', as commonly claimed? In this upcoming lecture Benjamin Selwyn will discuss his new book, co-authored with Christin Bernhold, which challenges this mainstream view by introducing the concept of Capitalist Value Chains (CVCs).
What happens when the end of the slave trade doesn't lead to freedom, but to a new form of bondage? In our next lecture with Jake Subryan Richards, he will explore the findings of The Bonds of Freedom: Liberated Africans and the End of the Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2025). Based on a decade of research across four continents, this study uncovers the "forgotten" history of individuals intercepted by maritime patrols and “liberated”, only to be coerced into years of forced labor to "repay" the costs of their own rescue. By examining archival records from Sierra Leone to Brazil and the United States, he analyzes the tension between imperial authoritarianism and the lived experiences of the African diaspora. A challenge to our understanding of emancipation that will examine how empires redefined "freedom" to suit their own economic and political needs.
How did Black symbolism become central to European apothecary culture? This lecture with Temitope Fagunwa, argues that this imagery resulted from three interconnected factors: the medieval Mediterranean spice trade, the transmission of Arabic and Greek pharmaceutical knowledge, and the cosmopolitan court of Frederick II in Sicily. By linking the material flow of goods like pepper and myrrh to the translation of scholarly texts and Hohenstaufen heraldry, this study identifies a medieval origin for symbols often misattributed to later eras. Ultimately, it fills a historiographical gap by connecting the history of science with the material and symbolic traditions of European commerce.
How does statelessness turn people into ‘bare’ or even ‘subhuman’ life? This upcoming lecture with Nasir Uddin, argues that the shift from statelessness to refugeehood is not linear but mediated by extreme violence, using the Rohingya as a case study. Drawing on the 2017 genocidal violence in Myanmar and its aftermath, it shows how the Rohingya, denied citizenship by Myanmar and recognition by Bangladesh, now live in conditions of protracted displacement, insecurity, and exclusion in Bangladesh’s borderlands, exemplifying life treated as less than human.
Is manumission truly a transition to complete independence? While we usually view "slave" and "free" as absolute states, historical evidence of partial manumission suggests otherwise. Spanning from Neo-Babylonia to early modern Cuba, records show individuals being freed only in "parts," remaining half-bound to their owners. Though treated as a matter of fact, this status created significant legal friction over how to manage a person who was simultaneously property and a free agent. This upcoming lecture by Rachel Zelnick-Abramovitz, will examine the origins of partial manumission, the legal paradoxes it created, and its surprising persistence across diverse cultures.
How did ancient slavery function outside the shadow of the Atlantic trade? While modern scholarship often uses recent history as a universal template, ancient slaving is best understood on its own terms rather than through a Western lens. This upcoming lecture explores three specific areas where pre-modern slave societies differ from modern ones: the immediate proximity to captive-taking, the complex integration of enslaved persons into the family unit, and their primary role as symbolic objects of power.
How did late-nineteenth-century Brazilian thinkers, working within a “Naturalistic Scientism” shaped by positivist and evolutionist theories, represent race and slavery in ways that ranged from claims of Black inferiority to calls for moral reparation, and how did the paternalistic normalization of slavery obscure racial hierarchies and sustain asymmetrical dependencies compared to the more overt racialization seen in the United States?
Beyond chattel slavery, who really built the global plantation complex? This lecture takes a global, longue durée approach, challenging the assumption that plantations relied solely on chattel slavery. Randy M. Browne reveals that planters were insidiously flexible, extracting labor from a wide variety of coerced workers, including convicts, indentured servants, and nominally free wage laborers across the Americas, the Indian Ocean, and Australia. What united these workers was the shared experience of forced migration, dispossession, and crushing violence.
What happens when 125,000 Chinese indentured men and enslaved African men and women work side by side on Cuban sugar plantations in the late nineteenth century? Nowhere else in history did these groups of unfree laborers meet in the same time and place. This unique encounter raises questions about race, class, and gender: Were the Chinese considered black or white, slave or free? How did the absence of Chinese women shape relations between Asians and Africans? Ultimately, were the Chinese “coolies” slaves like their black co-workers, or did they move toward freedom? This lecture explores these questions through key Cuban archival documents.
What does 50 years of Angolan independence really mean? This lecture revisits Angola’s complex history beyond nationalist or Western narratives, exploring how power, memory, and freedom intertwine. Using Palimpsest and Puzzle as tools, it reimagines Angola’s past and present through multiple perspectives.
How have African Atlantic artists transformed our understanding of slavery’s legacy? Drawing on Rice’s three decades of experience as an academic and curator, including work with the Whitworth Art Gallery, Lancaster Maritime Museum, and the International Slavery Museum, this lecture explores how artists from the 1950s to the 2020s, such as Althea McNish, Lubaina Himid, Ellen Gallagher, Jade de Montserrat, and Lela Harris, have used their art to interrogate slavery’s history and its aftermath. Alan Rice will show how their radical interventions and acts of guerrilla memorialisation have reshaped museums, challenged dominant narratives, and redefined the field of the Black Atlantic.
Before transatlantic slavery, European colonial powers used contract workers. After Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807/08, they sought new markets, especially in Latin America, and needed a wage-earning population. By the 1820s–30s, the idea of wage slavery emerged. In 1834, the British introduced the apprenticeship system in their colonies, a compromise with slave owners, until it collapsed in 1838 due to resistance. Still, it inspired the Indentured Labour System, bringing hundreds of thousands of Asian, African, and European contract workers to Caribbean plantations between 1833–1873. This lecture explores how brutal labor systems shaped global market development, focusing on Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and Curaçao.
The passage of the International Labour Organization’s Forced Labour Convention (No. 29) in 1930 was a momentous event in global labor history, signaling an ideological, if not practical, transition away from coercive labor practices like private sector forced labor and slavery. The presentation will explore how it shaped labor practices in British East Africa—accelerating the progression toward the abolition in some ways while leaving loopholes for coercion under the guise of "tradition" and Indirect Rule.
This lecture uses a range of printed materials and analytical methods to address the vocabulary of slavery in England during the long seventeenth century and traces what was an important process of vernacularisation. Moreover, it aims at identifying the kinds of socio-economic, gendered relations and tensions, that the language of slavery was used to characterise, as well as the semantic stability (or not) of the vocabulary over time. In so doing, the lecture also begins to assess the impact of colonial developments on vernacular discussions of the social order: not least the institutionalisation of indentured service and racist chattel slavery in the Caribbean and American seaboard.
How did issues of intimacy, like sexuality, pregnancy, coercion, and family, shaped enslaved women’s decisions to resist during slave rebellions in the Caribbean and U.S. South? This lecture explores how reproductive autonomy, kinship, and sacred knowledge influenced enslaved women’s resistance, often overlooked in historical archives and scholarship. From ending pregnancies to escaping with children or forming maroon communities, women resisted both bondage and the exploitation of their bodies. This work-in-progress highlights how family and intimacy were central, not peripheral, to the politics of rebellion and the fight to undermine the capitalist logic of Atlantic slavery.
What if enslaved and formerly enslaved literary workers played a crucial role in the composition of the Synoptic Gospels? This lecture challenges assumptions in New Testament scholarship’s “Synoptic Problem,” which explores the literary relationships between Matthew, Mark, and Luke. By uncovering the invisible labor of these uncredited collaborators, this article reimagines gospel writing and expands the boundaries of New Testament studies.
How did marginalized groups in rigid societies find paths to economic and social mobility? In the Roman Empire, lower-class individuals navigated established systems and forged their own routes to upward mobility, often through local professional and voluntary associations that linked them to the elite. This talk will examine epigraphic texts and Roman naming practices to explore how enslaved and freed individuals—excluded from traditional networks—leveraged their official organization, the familia publica, to engage in civic life, public events, and socioeconomic structures. This case study sheds light on asymmetrical dependency in Roman society and speaks to modern debates about the lasting impact of enslavement.