Full Description
Longlisted for the 2024 Berger Prize.
An important illustrated history of the relationship between Cambridge and the Black Atlantic.
Between 1400 and 1900, European powers, not least Britain, colonised the Americas and transported over 12.5 million people from sub-Saharan Africa as slaves. The contested space, formed by the interactions of multiple people and cultures, both Black and white, we now call the Black Atlantic. Cambridge and Cambridgeshire played a key role in this international narrative - a story of commerce, profit and colonialism, of opinion-forming, and of struggle.
Through the lens of historic artworks, artefacts and natural history specimens, this book and the exhibition it accompanies analyse the rise and growth of enslavement, the profits made by Dutch and British traders and plantation-owners, the power of images, the knowledge produced by enslaved people, histories of resistance movements and the consequences of these events today. Works by contemporary makers challenge long-held assumptions, address erasures, and create alternative narratives of repair, freedom and justice.
Contents
Contributor biographies
Acknowledgements
Foreword by Luke Syson
Introduction
Section 1: Before Atlantic Enslavement
1. Africa: Akan Region
2. Indigenous Islands in the Caribbean Sea
3. Europe: Slavery Before Racism; Blackness Before Slavery
Section 2: Cambridge Wealth from Atlantic Enslavement
1. Royal Patronage
2. Making Money: Dutch Connections
3. Technology for the Transatlantic Trade
4. Warfare Between the British, Dutch and Spanish Empires
Section 3: Fashion, Consumption and Racism
1. Blackness in European Art
2. Enslavement and Fashion
Section 4: Plantations: Production and Resistance
1. Production, Knowledge Generation and Exploitation
2. Plantation Violence
3. Remembering
Further Reading
Image credits
Index
