Iberian slave trade and slavery : towards a global perspective

African enslaved workers had a key role in the configuration of the modern Atlantic world. The impact of the traffic in human beings deeply reverberated across the north and south Atlantic, leaving its profound imprint both on the western and eastern coasts. Over three centuries, millions of Africans were violently transported from Africa to the Americas. The consequences of this injurious and long-lasting commerce can be observed even nowadays.
This seminar will offer an overview of the current debates and will summarily introduce the most recently produced literature on the topic. It will revolve around three main themes, which, in turn, reflects the path that the scholarship has followed in the last decades: numbers games, geographies of trade and exploitation, names and lived experiences.
This seminar on Iberian slave trade sets appart from most works and seeks to approach both the slave traffic and the subsequent experiences of slavery from a global perspective. In spite of the impressive advances recently yielded, most of the works in the field continue to be framed within narrow national or local perspectives. Therefore, overspecialization is prevalent. In contraposition, in this seminar, we will compare the Portuguese and Spanish empires and put them into a larger global context.