Voices of Resistance: A Global Micro-Historical Approach to Enslavement across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean

Introduction

Historiography suggests that the different ways in which people were enslaved (e.g. through war, kidnapping, debt, birth) mattered greatly for how they resisted and were treated under slavery. These links remain largely unexplored, but are vital to re-understanding the history and present of slavery. This project studies how responses to modes of enslavement impacted:

1. Slave trade patterns
2. Labelling and treatment
3. Strategies of the enslaved across the Indian Ocean, Indonesian archipelago, and Atlantic.

Methodology

The project employs a global (micro)historical approach to study the uniquely detailed material from colonial court records containing voices of enslaved and other actors as witnesses, victims, or accused. These provide a lens on modes of enslavement, practices of slavery, and strategies of the enslaved that surface both ‘transgressions’ and the considered ‘normal’, creating multiplicities of views on ‘circumstances’ and ‘backgrounds’.

Indexation and proven qualitative methods are used to analyse the court records. The rich and increasing digitized colonial archives allow for contextualization strategies and expanding on innovative digital research infrastructure (GLOBALISE).

Project Team

The project team tackles key cases related to the key European empires (Portuguese, Spanish, French, English, Dutch). Fruitful team synergy is created by ‘light’ collective efforts that allow connecting, comparing, and analyzing research results from the subprojects (e.g. on the same groups of enslaved, such as Balinese, Pulaya, or Malagasy, as they occur in different case study regions and archives).

Significance

The project bridges historiographic gaps between the Indian Ocean and Indonesian archipelago (‘East’) and Atlantic (‘West’). It revisits our understanding of slavery by innovating debates on:

1. The global context of nationalized narratives of slavery history
2. The impact of enslavement in relation to different slavery regimes
3. The ‘uniqueness’ of Atlantic slavery and racialization.