Atlantic Studies Section: Experiments in Empire—Slavery, Slave Trading, and Colonization in the Early Modern Atlantic World

Slavery and slave trading constituted Iberian rule, as an economic practice that unevenly generated wealth, but also as an instrument of race-making. Forged through religious and political conquest, slavery and its attendant (and divergent) racializing processes became a mode of early modern governance, wherein slavery helped establish colonial sovereignty through violence and juridical enclosure. How these governing practices developed and how colonized subjects responded to them widely depended on a range of factors, including their own existing sociocultural dynamics, religious beliefs, and environmental and pharmaceutical knowledges. This roundtable brings together seven specialists to discuss how they approach these relationships in their own research on the early modern Atlantic World.