Slavery and Freedom in the Atlantic World:
Statutes, Science, and the Seas
A Colloquium
Co-Sponsored by
The University of Michigan and
The University of Windsor
March 30-April 1, 2006
The trans-Atlantic slave trade and the New World system of chattel slavery that sprang from it constituted a displacement unlike any that had preceded it. Whether in terms of the numbers of bodies—some ten million Africans by some counts—or the breadth of terrain—one ocean, three continents, and numerous other islands and waterways—slavery was an essential force in the construction of what we now term the Atlantic World. Slavery’s frequently invoked corollary, freedom, is no less dazzling in its proportions. Over the course of more than a century, societies in the Americas, from Bahia, Brazil, to Bruxton, Canada, were transformed as the formerly enslaved took up the challenges of emancipation. Here the displacements were literal and metaphorical. Surely there was the lifting off of material degradations of punishment and forced sale; but freedom at its essence required the displacement of an old order that viewed people of African descent as best suited for servitude, replacing it with one that remade them as rights-bearing citizens. These were the broad strokes of a world that was remade through the battles against slavery and the collective efforts to construct freedom. They were strokes so bold that they resonate through struggles against inequality and exploitation to this day.
Historians have long been drawn to this subject matter precisely because the dynamics of slavery and freedom resonate so enduringly. Through the work of a previous generation, we learned about the magnitude of Atlantic slavery, and discovered the social, political and economic forces that it generated. We also saw the intimate lives of enslaved people brought to light, restoring to the record their capacities to extract the most from a system structured to offer them very, very little. A comparative approach has sometimes permitted us to view several of slavery’s varied locales through a single lens. Through this we learned to carefully consider the ways that slavery was inflected by time, place, and space, even as other forces linked both slave systems and the lives of slaves throughout the Americas to one another. Recent work has done the same for emancipation, demonstrating that struggles for freedom and citizenship in places like Cuba and Louisiana, Saint Domingue and France, overlapped in unexpected ways. For the current generation, the study of slavery and freedom is being remade through engagements with broader trends in historical scholarship. The insights of Atlantic World and African Diasporic studies have complemented the comparative approach, allowing historians to see the interrelatedness of what have often been thought of as discrete sites in the story of slavery and freedom. The approaches of political, economic and social history have been supplemented by methods drawn from cultural history and microhistory, requiring historians of slavery and freedom to work with sources close to lived experience while also contributing to broader narratives of both meaning and experience.
“Statutes, Science, and the Seas: The Dynamics of Slavery and Freedom in the Atlantic World” is a gathering of an international community of such scholars whose current work seeks to excavate the daily dynamics of slavery and freedom, while reshaping the broad narratives within which we situate them. Central to our inquiry is legal culture--from legislatures and courtrooms to the jurys cantonnaux of the French Antilles and the office of notaries public in Brazil, Cuba, and Louisiana. These were often sites for the exercise of slaveholders’ power, yet they also provided the openings through which slaves and former slaves constructed claims for rights and citizenship. Also essential are discourses of science--from labor systems and medicine to architecture and land management. Science served as meta-text that rationalized systemic inequality and exploitation, while simultaneously providing the terrain upon which struggles over the daily lives of the enslaved and the meaning of freedom were waged. The many waterways of the Americas provide our final theme. Be it the Atlantic itself, the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River or the Great Lakes, a focus on the seas allows us to see how law, science and the life of the sea constructed the Atlantic World and the African Diaspora as imagined communities and lived experience.
[DRAFT, November 15, 2005]
Slavery and Freedom in the Atlantic World:
Statutes, Science, and the Seas
A Colloquium
Co-Sponsored by
The University of Michigan and
The University of Windsor
March 30-April 1, 2006
THURSDAY, MARCH 30:
Session at University of Windsor, Toldo Health Education Building, Room 100
4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVES OF SLAVERY AND FREEDOM IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD
Welcome: Steven Palmer and Rebecca J. Scott
"The Slave in Court: Marie-Joseph-Angelique and the King's Justice, Montreal, 1734"
Afua Cooper
"The World Beyond the Atlantic: Writing Indigenous Narratives into the History of Early America"
Michael Witgen
Comments: David Hancock and Reem Bahdi
Reception to follow.
FRIDAY, MARCH 31:
University of Michigan, Institute for the Humanities, Osterman Commons Room, 0540 Rackham Building, 915 E. Washington Street, Ann Arbor.
[These sessions will be available at the University of Windsor participants via video-link in Toldo Health Education Building, Room 203.]
9:45 a.m. - 10:00 a.m.
WELCOME AND OVERVIEW
Martha S. Jones
10:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
SLAVERY AND THE LAW
Chair. Christina Simmons
"Slaves and the Creation of Rights in Cuba"
Alejandro de la Fuente
"Priests Marking Color: The Baptismal Registers of Salvador, Bahia"
Jean Hébrard
"Race Beyond the Plantation: Slavery, Free Persons of African Descent, and the Problem of Collective Identities in Spanish Santo Domingo"
Richard Turits
Comments: Susanna Blumenthal and Ariela Gross
2:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
LAW AND THE MEANINGS OF FREEDOM
Chair: Hannah Rosen
"Les homes dangereux de 1848. Crime politique et déportation dans l'espace colonial français" [The Dangerous Men of 1848: Political Crime and Deportation in the French Colonial World] Myriam Cottias
"Baptiste v. de Volunbrun": Making the Atlantic World, One Case at a Time"
Martha S. Jones
Comments: Fernando Martínez Heredia (via video link) and Ellen Katz
5:00 - 6:30 p.m.
GRADUATE STUDENT WORKING GROUP MEETING
7:30 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.
WHAT IS THE ATLANTIC?
EMPIRES AND ISLANDS: RE-ENVISIONING THE EARLY ATLANTIC WORLD; A CONVERSATION University of Michigan, Michigan League, 911 N. University, Hussey Room, Ann Arbor
Moderator: Julius S. Scott
Discussants: Mamadou Diouf and Michael Zeuske
SATURDAY, APRIL 1
All sessions at Radisson Hotel, 277 Riverside Drive West, River Room, Windsor, Ontario.
9:45 a.m. - 10:00 a.m.
WELCOME AND OVERVIEW
Steven Palmer
10:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
SCIENCE ON SLAVES, SLAVES ON SCIENCE
Chair: Neil Safier
"Coffee Systems: Slavery, Emancipation, and Science in the West Indies, 1750-1950"
Stuart McCook
"Property Rights in Human Beings, Property Rights in Animals: The Beginnings of the Environmental Movement in Cuba in the Era of Slave Emancipation"
Reinaldo Funes
"A Contingent Liaison? Slavery, Social Science and Science in the 19th Century"
Alejandra Bronfman
Comment: Steven Palmer and Alexandra Stern
12:30 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.
LUNCH DISCUSSION. NEW INSIGHTS FROM THE ARCHIVES: THE AMISTAD IN CUBA
Moderator: Rebecca J. Scott
Discussants: Michael Zeuske and Orlando García Martínez
Lunch provided.
2:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
NEWS OF FREEDOM: THE CIRCULATION OF IDEAS IN THE CARIBBEAN
Chair: Robert Whitney
"Talk About Haiti: The Archive and the Atlantic's Haitian Revolution"
Ada Ferrer
"Itinerant Citizenship: The Cosmopolitan World of Equal-Rights Activism in 19th Century New Orleans"
Rebecca J. Scott
Comments: Catherine Legrand and Sueann Caulfield
Fernando Martínez Heredia
Sponsored by:
The University of Michigan: Law in Slavery and Freedom Project, the Program in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Atlantic Studies Initiative, the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies, the Law School, Department of History, Institute for the Humanities, Rackham Graduate School.
The University of Windsor: Office of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Office of the President, Office of the Provost and Vice-President
- Academic, Office of the Vice-President - Research, Department of History, Centre for Studies in Social Justice, Humanities Research Group, Faculty of Law, Department of Political Science.
ALL SESSIONS ARE FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.