Slave Trading in the Spanish and British Atlantic Worlds

Since an English privateer's seizure of African captives on a Portuguese vessel bound for Spanish America redirected "20 and odd negroes" to British North America in 1619, Spain and Britain forged a complex and shifting relationship over the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In the last decade, demographic and statistical innovations generated by Slave Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (and its new companion, the Intra-American Slave Trade Database) have dramatically reinvigorated and altered the study of the Atlantic slave trade, highlighting the centrality of the British and Spanish Atlantic worlds therein. With generous support from the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA, this two-day conference will bring together a diverse group of leading scholars of the slave trade in the Spanish and British Empires, all of whom are based in the United States and the United Kingdom, to provoke further conversation, collaboration, and innovation.

Conference registration includes admission to The Huntington grounds and galleries.

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

Friday, June 2, 2023

8:30 a.m. | Check-In

9:30  a.m. | Welcome

• Sue Juster (The Huntington)
• Emily Berquist Soule (California State University, Long Beach)
• Gregory E. O'Malley (University of California, Santa Cruz)

10 a.m. | Session 1 The Early Slave Trade
Moderator: Brett Rushforth (University of Oregon)

• Marc Eagle (Western Kentucky University)
  “A Multinational Business: The Early Slave Trade to Spanish America, 1500-1640”
• William Pettigrew (Lancaster University)
  “A Gateway Trade? The Royal Adventurers and the Royal Navy”

11 a.m. | Break

11:30 a.m. | Session 2 The Trade in Africa
Moderator: Manuel Covo (University of California, Santa Barbara)

• Emily Berquist Soule (California State University, Long Beach)
  “Spain's Slave Trading Agenda and African Sovereignty in the Gulf of Guinea Islands, 1778-1783”
• G. Ugo Nwokeji (University of California, Berkeley)
  “Sexuality and the Slave Trade from the Bight of Biafra”

12:30 p.m. | Lunch

1:30 p.m. | Session 3 Captive Experiences
Moderator: Evelyne Laurent-Perrault (University of California, Santa Barbara)

• Elise Mitchell (Princeton University)
  “Epidemic Experiences: Smallpox, Quarantine, and the Slave Trade in the Caribbean”
• Sabrina Smith (University of California, Merced)
  “Captive Crossings: The Interregional and Transatlantic Movement of Enslaved People in New Spain”

Saturday, June 3, 2023

9:30 a.m. | Check-In

10 a.m. | Session 4 Slave Traders
Moderator: Kevin Dawson (University of California, Merced)

• Jorge Felipe Gonzalez (The University of Texas at San Antonio)
  “The Hour of our Happiness: Merchants and the Foundation of the Cuban-based Transatlantic Slave Trade”
• Nicholas Radburn (Lancaster University)
  “The Lindo Family and the Legacies of a Jamaican Slave Trading Fortune”

11 a.m. | Break

11:30 a.m. | Session 5 Commodities in the Slave Trade
Moderator: Ana Lucia Araujo (Howard University)

• Alex Borucki (University of California, Irvine)
• José L. Belmonte, Universidad de Sevilla (in absentia)
  “The Slave Trade, Silver, and the Financing of the Spanish Empire”
• Chris Evans (University of South Wales)
  “African Markets and the (partial) Revolutionizing of Britain's Metal Trades in the Eighteenth Century”

12:30 p.m. | Lunch

1:30 p.m. | Session 6 The Era of the Illegal Slave Trade
Moderator: Sharla Fett (Occidental College)

• Marcela Echeverri (Yale University)
  “The Slave Trade and Abolition in the Spanish American Republics”
• John Harris (Erskine University)
  “Mary Jane Watson and the Role of Women as Slave Traders”

2:30 p.m. | Concluding Discussion

• Emily Berquist Soule (California State University, Long Beach), Gregory E. O'Malley (University of California, Santa Cruz), and the audience.

Funding provided by The Huntington’s Dorothy Collins Brown Endowment and the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.

Image: “Señora principal con su Negra esclava.” Vicente Albán, 1783, Quito (Ecuador). MAM 00073. Museo de América.