Slavery and Abolition: Global and Historical Perspectives

3 units

This course examines the related phenomena of slavery and abolition in world history. It adopts comparative historical methods to tentatively identify common or recurring features of slavery and other forms of unfree labor, as well as noting singular or unique contexts. The geographic and chronological scope of the course ranges from the pre-modern/classical world to the present, with particular emphasis on the European/American enslavement of Africans and their descendants from the 16th century onward and its abolition across the 19th century, and, in this particular context, still narrower attention on slavery and abolition in the USA. Consideration is chiefly historical, and the course draws on a range of interdisciplinary approaches including economics, colonial studies, and anthropology.