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Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture by Marcos Leitão De Almeida

My work addresses a persistent problem in African history: the deep history of slavery in the Lower Congo region. While historians acknowledge the importance of Lower Congo societies in shaping Atlantic slavery, they rarely consider what slaverymeant and how indigenous communities in the region practiced it. This state of affairs has fueled a long-standing debate among historians and anthropologists around two topics: (1) whether ‘slavery’ emerged in the Lower Congo prior to the arrival of Europeans and (2) whether the very ‘institution’ of slavery is Eurocentric. In this talk, I show how heuristic categories that historians use to understand slavery—such as thresholds between clientship and slavery, the dichotomy between free and slave, or the distinction between chattel and lineage slavery—misrecognize the original pathway of slavery in this region.
Time
Monday, 25.10.21 - 04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Event format
Lecture series
Topic
The Problem of Slavery in the Lower Congo: The Categories for ‘Slave,’ ‘Pawn’ and ‘Captive’ in the Longue Durée (ca. 1000 BCE to ca. 1870s)
Target groups

Students

Researchers

Languages
English
Location
Online via Zoom
Reservation
not required
Organizer
BCDSS
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