In his new book, Trevor Burnard argues that existing models of global slavery derived from sociology and modelled closely on antebellum American slavery should be replaced by the idea of a global slavery that is more comprehensive and less American. He suggests that we can understand the global history of slavery by linking it more closely to another important world institution – empires – in a way that historicizes the study of history as an institution with a history that changes over time and space. Moreover, we can learn from scholars of modern slavery, and make greater use of the vast array of usable sources on the lives, experiences and thoughts of the enslaved, from ancient times to the present, to make these voices of the enslaved crucial drivers of how we conceptualize and describe the different kinds of global slavery in world history.
Having already given us a glimpse of his work and its genesis at this year's International PhD Seminar on Slavery, Servitude and Extreme Dependency at the BCDSS in late October, we are very pleased that the book has been published and is now available for reading and study.