Friday Seminar with Justin Roberts

This week, our fellow Justin Roberts is looking forward to a lively discussion of and feedback on his project “Fragile Empire: Slavery in the Early English Tropics, 1645-1720.”

As a framework, the global tropics offers us a new way of thinking about the origins of slavery in the English empire. The English took advantage of a wide variety of bondage systems to support their commercial and territorial expansion in the global tropics. By the 1680s, one variant of racial slavery had outcompeted other forms of bondage within the empire. It was marked by its permanence, its heritability, its impermeable boundaries, and its distinct brutality. It was associated with the tropical zone. The dominance of this genus of bondage shaped the ongoing threats of insurrection and invasion in England’s expanding tropical empire.