How did the slave peculium function in the socio-legal context of the Roman Empire?

What did it mean to be enslaved in in the Indian Ocean world in the 18th and 19th centuries? Over the last decades, historians have mined French, British, Portuguese and Dutch records for quantitative data on the European slave trade. This project focuses on the experience of being a slave and seeks…

This project applies a social-historical approach to examine and contrast various groups of African-American slave refugees who sought freedom within North America between 1800 and 1860. It innovatively distinguishes between different “spaces of freedom” for runaway slaves, namely sites of formal, semi-formal,…

Being a Slave brings together scholars and writers who try to come to terms with the histories and legacies of European slavery in the Indian Ocean.

In Slaving Zones: Cultural Identities, Ideologies, and Institutions in the Evolution of Global Slavery, fourteen authors—including both world-leading and emerging historians of slavery—engage with the ‘Slaving Zones’ theory.

How did slaves in the eighteenth century manage to empower themselves and their kin, and why did this become all the more difficult in the nineteenth century?

For hundreds of years, the island of Sri Lanka was a crucial stopover for people and goods in the Indian Ocean. For the Dutch East India Company, it was also a crossroads in the Indian Ocean slave trade. Slavery was present in multiple forms in Sri Lanka—then Ceylon—when the British conquered the island…

SLAVES TO THE SYSTEM: Locating Responsibility for Forced Expatriate Labour Practices by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)

To what extent did the Netherlands grow rich from the Transatlantic slave trade? In his dissertation 'Walcherse Ketens', Gerhard de Kok looks at Vlissingen and Middelburg, the most important slave trade cities in the Netherlands during the second half of the 18th century. It turns out that, although…

The idea that prejudices about the (Middle)-East came to be during the colonisation of North-Africa in the 19th century is false. Mounir el-Badri wrote a cum laude bachelor thesis about orientalist judgments with which 18th century slaves in Morocco much earlier characterised their captors with.

‘In recent publications about the slave trade the same rhetorical weapons are used as two centuries ago in the battle for the abolition of the British slave trade. It is a topic fraught with emotions, but that should not prevent historians from being as careful and impartial as possible in their research,’…

Afro-American slaves in the 19th century did not always flee to the north of the United States, according to historical research. Most of the slaves who fled remained in the southern states and posed as free coloured people. This is the conclusion that Professor Damian Pargas from Leiden University…

When many people think of slavery, they think of the translatlantic trade that took place between Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean.

MIDDELBURG/GENEVA – The president of the United Nations Human Rights Council has invited the Zeeland Archives from the Netherlands, to Geneva on March 20th in order to present its project about the historical slave voyage aboard The Unity (1761-1763).

The dental remains of 25 enslaved Africans from the site of Newton's Plantation, on Barbados, were subjected to isotope analysis. Previous research had pointed out that the locally born individuals were subjected to high concentrations of lead poisoning. A new study, done by Dr Jason Laffoon among others…

Forgotten Lineages explores the paths through which generations of formally enslaved and their descendants gradually forgot their past of enslavement under Dutch and British imperial rule and became local subjects in Sri Lanka and South Africa. It explores why and how forgetting rather than memory became…

This book sheds new light on domestic forced migration by examining the experiences of American-born slave migrants from a comparative perspective.

We are proud to announce that the 1st Volume of INTER-SECTION is now available.

In the series 'PhD in the Picture', our PhD students tell us all about their research: what are their findings? How did they do it, and how does their research touch upon hot topics in our society today?

Bordering Up: Regulating Mobility Through Passes, Walls and Guards

Moving Romans offers an analysis of Roman migration by applying general insights, models and theories from the field of migration history.

This thesis analyses the existence and the functioning of the urban labour market in the early Roman empire by looking at the crucial influence of social structures, such as the family and non-familial labour collectives.

These four volumes offer students and researchers a rich collection of published works on the history of slavery works by some of the most preeminent scholars in the field.

LIAS aims to advance the globally conscious vision of area studies, both within and outside the academic community. Focusing on Asia and the Middle East, the institute is a meeting place of multiple fields of inquiry, theories and methods, historical periods, and areas.

Browse the latest articles and issues of Inter-Section.

Painstaking research in Dutch and Portuguese archive materials, so far poorly assessed on the topic of social relations, reveals intense and intricate associations between different European individuals both in terms of ethnicity and social strata.

How geographical and institutional openness in Dutch Guiana fostered a unique colonial economy. This publication is part of the Early American Places Series.

Unlike most city histories, this book focuses exclusively on the city’s connections with colonialism and slavery.

The rise and fall of Dutch Brazil (1624-1654) was a major news story in early modern Europe, and marked the emergence of a

Lecture, Histories Connected: Work-in-Progress

What are the immediate and lasting effects of the colonial encounters on indigenous Caribbean cultures and societies and what were the intercultural dynamics that took place during the colonisation processes? How can the study of indigenous Caribbean histories contribute to a more sophisticated awareness…

The project examines the political conflict in the Red River Valley of Louisiana between the majority-black Republican Party and the overwhelmingly white Democratic Party by studying the composition and actions of each party.

Lecture, Histories Connected: Masterclass

This project investigates how early print media covered distant but urgent geopolitical conflicts, using newspapers from the Low Countries, north and south.

The chaotic years after the Civil War are often seen as a time of uniquely American idealism—a revolutionary attempt to rebuild the nation that paved the way for the civil rights movement of the twentieth century. But Adam Fairclough rejects this prevailing view, challenging prominent historians such…

The Colonial and Global History Research Programme of the Leiden University Institute for History combines a deep curiosity of transcultural processes such as imperialism, (de)colonization, and globalization with critical historical research on regional societies in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

Everything you need to know about the minor American Studies.

Global Interactions sponsors a number of research projects of Leiden University researchers.

The Journal of Global Slavery (JGS) aims to advance and promote a greater understanding of slavery and post-slavery from comparative, transregional, and/or global perspectives. It especially underscores the global and globalizing nature of slavery in world history.

Since the Middle Passage is in the North Atlantic, and the North Atlantic has a relationship with the arctic, what relationship does the Arctic have with the Middle Passage? How can this relationship be used to provide a space of healing by uncovering Afro/diasporic counter narratives?

In Sri Lanka, a prominent Singhalese Buddhist monk publicly proclaims that it is not a sin to kill Tamils. In Japan, the family register kept in a Buddhist temple and specifying the outcaste status of a lineage is provided to private detectives investigating the marriageability of a young woman. Throughout…

The focus of my research project are the archival scribes who wrote private legal documents in ancient Babylonia. Thousands of such records from the first millennium BCE have survived to this day. These documents were written on clay in cuneiform script, using Akkadian language. My sources are selected…

Hieratic Papyrology

French title: Communication et violences dans le Guéra et le Moyen-Chari (Tchad) de 1940 à 2010. This research investigates the relationship between the introduction of new means of communication and violence experienced by the local populations in the Moyen-Chari and the Guéra regions in Chad from…

Oran Kennedy

Thomas Mareite is a PhD student at the University of Leiden. His PhD project focuses on slave refugees in Mexico, 1800-1860.

Viola Müller is a PhD candidate at the Leiden University Institute for History. Her research focuses on slave refugees in the US South, 1800-1860.

Individual traders should be at the forefront of the study of early modern world trade rather than institutions such as states and companies, argues Professor of Global Economic Networks Cátia Antunes. Inaugural lecture on 9 June.