The Leiden Slavery Studies Association (LSSA) is dedicated to promoting a greater understanding of slavery and post-slavery in any period and any geographical region.

This series provides a venue for scholarly work—research monographs and edited volumes—that advances our understanding of the history of slavery and post-slavery in any period and any geographical region. It fills an important gap in academic publishing and builds upon two relatively recent developments…

The Leiden Slavery Studies Association (LSSA) is dedicated to promoting a greater understanding of slavery and post-slavery in any period and any geographical region.

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.

During the Slavery Memorial Year, from 1 July 2023 to 1 July 2024, the Kingdom of the Netherlands will reflect on its colonial and slavery history.

The colonial and slavery past is an important theme in education and research at Leiden University. Particular attention is also paid to structural abuses that arose from this history and that often still persist in the present day.

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

The Leiden Slavery Studies Association cooperates with the following partners:

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.

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?

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…

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…

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.

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

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.

An international congress, lectures and a new book series and magazine. It’s a hot topic at the moment that attracts broad public interest. Researchers, from historians to legal experts, are bringing together their expertise in the Leiden Slavery Studies Association.

The University of Bonn, Germany, is happy to announce the opening of the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS).

In a speech on Keti Koti the Dutch king, Willem-Alexander, apologised on behalf of the royal family for the Netherlands’ historical role in slavery. What is the significance of this?

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,…

‘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,’…

Where did the new generation of antislavery activists get their inspiration to organize in large-scale pressure groups?

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…

As a practice in which human beings were held captive for an indefinite period of time, coerced into extremely dependent and exploitative power relationships, denied rights (including rights over their labor, lives, and bodies), often vulnerable to forced relocation by various means, and forced to labor…

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.

The Impact of Mobility and Migration in the Roman Empire assembles a series of papers on key themes in the study of Roman mobility and migration.

As an educational and research institution Leiden University is seeking to understand its own relationship with the colonial and slavery past.

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…

This book provides an overview of critical scholarly reflections on the history of Dutch slavery and colonization, as well as how this translates into critical cultural practices.

The Global Abolitionisms Network, established in 2015, is an international network of scholars working on antislavery activism and abolitionism. It is affiliated to the Leiden Slavery Studies Association.

The key subject of the research programme Cities, Migration and Global Interdependence 1500-now (CMGI) is Inequality (at local, national and global levels). We study this from an intersectional perspective: gender, class, ethnicity or race, religion, sexuality, age, ability/disability, citizenship and…

Everything you need to know about the minor Cultural Memory of War and Conflict.

Of the 17 Rubicon grants that NWO recently awarded, three have gone to researchers at Leiden University. They can spend a longer period of time doing research at an institute abroad.

Everything you need to know about the minor American Studies.

This is an Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility project of the Faculty of Humanities with the Anton de Kom University in Paramaribo.

There is no heritage without emotional sharing and clashing. This article explores the involvement of divergent emotions in heritage making by discussing the debate series of Imagine IC and the Reinwardt Academy and zooming in on the commemoration of slavery and imagery of ‘Black Pete’ in the Netherlands.…

Scientific research on Colonialism and Slavery is done from different research programmes and different disciplines.

Our research focuses on a number of subthemes, such as the history of collecting, the agency of museum collections, the ethics of collecting (including legal aspects), and the integration of humanities and technical research in exploring the collections.

Space for open dialogue on historical slavery was created at the Keti Koti Table at Museum De Lakenhal, organised by Leiden University and the Municipality of Leiden. There, just metres away from 17th-century paintings, Leideners shared a ritual meal and spoke about the effects of slavery and our colonial…

From 1 September 2014, Glen Newey takes up the post of Professor of Practical Philosophy in Leiden University’s Institute for Philosophy.