Date/Time: Wednesday 19th December 2018, 2:00-4:00pm

Venue: Politics Building, G.22

This research seminar is co-convened by Politics and the Postcolonial Research Group. It is free and open for everyone to attend.

Abstract

David Tomich coined the term Second Slavery to describe the slave system that connected Africa, Southern United States, Caribbean, Brazil and Europe during the 19th Century. This system, he argued, is one that is substantially different from the colonial slavery of the preceding centuries due to – mainly – the volume of people enslaved in a time that liberal thought was already emergent. By establishing one narrative that traces the contact between slavery in different American spaces, what Tomich was able to see is that each national narrative on slavery showed one part of a larger phenomenon that could be seen in a wider frame, a frame able to relate politically, economically and culturally different shores of the Atlantic Ocean in a capitalist system. My two goals in this encounter will be: first, to present this concept of Second Slavery, an overview of the politics of slavery in Brazil in 19th Century and how this bibliography has a great influence in a country whose History has been strongly influenced by a perception of exceptionalism, especially in relation to its Latin American neighbours. The second goal is to put this research in perspective to the historical narratives in IR, for although the debate initiated by Tomich has resonated in Brazilian historiography, it has had no influence in the Historical narrative of International Relations, one that is still greatly focused on 19th Century Europe teleologically justifying the emergence of 1st World War.