ERC research project Voices of Resistance
A global historical approach to enslavement across the Atlantic & Indian Ocean. This is the aim of the ERC Consolidator Project Voices of Resistance led by Matthias van Rossum.
This project studies how different modes of enslavement impacted slave trade, resistance and racialization. It questions how different modes of enslavement impacted i) patterns of slave trade, ii) the labelling and treatment of enslaved, iii) and the social and resistance strategies of enslaved in the early modern wider Indian Ocean worlds (including the Indonesian Archipelago, East Asia and Pacific) in comparison to the Atlantic world.
The project employs a global micro-historical approach to study the uniquely detailed material from colonial court and other records containing voices of enslaved and other actors as witnesses, victims or accused. These provide a lens on modes of enslavement, practices of slavery and strategies of enslaved that surface both ‘transgressions’ and the considered ‘normal’, creating multiplicities of views on ‘circumstances’ and ‘backgrounds’. Indexation and other proven qualitative methods are used to analyse the court records. The rich and increasing digitized colonial archives allow for contextualization strategies and expanding on innovative digital research infrastructure in collaboration with Exploring Slave Trade in Asia and GLOBALISE.
The project team tackles key cases related to the key European empires throughout Asia (Portuguese, Spanish, French, English, Dutch). The project aims to both balance and bridge the historiographic gaps between the Indian Ocean and Indonesian archipelago (‘East’) and Atlantic (‘West’). Doings so, the project hopes to contribute to revisiting our understanding of slavery by impacting debates on the global contexts of nationalized narratives of slavery history, the impact of enslavement in relation to different slavery regimes, and the ‘uniqueness’ of Atlantic slavery and racialization.
More information, blogs and sources: https://voices.iisg.nl
- Project team
- Matthias van Rossum
- Filipa Ribeiro da Silva
- Camille Le Brettevillois
- Pascal Konings
- Alisha Ma
- Iliana Tintori Reyes
- Bethany Warner
- Elisabeth Heijmans
Funding
Voices of Enslavement is financed by the European Research Council (ERC) in the ERC Consolidator Programme. The project started 1 July 2024 and will continue until 31 June 2029.
