Grant for ERC research project Voices of Resistance

The ERC grant provides a large and innovative contribution to a research agenda that aims to investigate how responses to different forms of enslavement impacted slavery and racialization, and to bring the study of slavery in Asia in conversation with Atlantic scholarship. The project will allow four PhD researchers to explore a large number of case studies of enslavement, slavery and racialization in the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago worlds. They will explore different European colonial archives (most notably the French, Portuguese and Spanish, and in addition Dutch and British material) to study source material that provide access to the voices of the enslaved. With two postdoc position the expertise on Atlantic history and Digital Humanities will be strengthened. Together this will contribute to revisiting the global history of slavery from below.

The Voices of Resistance project will work together with ongoing projects on the slave trade in Asia (Exploring Slave Trade in Asia), resistance and slavery in the Dutch colonial empire (Resisting Enslavement) and the developing research infrastructure for the digital archive of the Dutch East India Company (GLOBALISE).

About the European Research Council (ERC)
The ERC, set up by the European Union in 2007, is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. It funds creative researchers of any nationality and age, to run projects based across Europe. The ERC offers four core grant schemes: Starting Grants, Consolidator Grants, Advanced Grants and Synergy Grants. With its additional Proof of Concept Grant scheme, the ERC helps grantees to bridge the gap between their pioneering research and early phases of its commercialisation. The ERC is led by an independent governing body, the Scientific Council. Out of 2,130 candidates, the European Research Council has selected 308 researchers for this year’s Consolidator Grants.