Thursday, May 2 –
Saturday, May 4, 2019
*All events are free and open to the public. Registration required for tours
“Slavery’s Hinterlands: Capitalism and Bondage in Rhode Island and Across the Atlantic World," a symposium, which will take place on May 3 and May 4 (including a talk the evening of May 2), will include tours of the Old Slater Mill historic landmark, the John Brown House Museum, and College Hill, and live interviews with academic and public historians conducted by Daniel Denvir to be aired on Jacobin’s The Dig podcast. Note that the tours are free but require registration in advance because capacity is limited. If you have any questions about the symposium, please reach out to julia_rock@brown.edu.
Slavery’s Hinterlands is a two-day symposium gathering academic and public historians to explore American slavery as it was: not merely the South’s “peculiar” institution but a core feature of American capitalism and empire; a critical facet of the industrial revolution, territorial expansion, and native dispossession that made the United States the most powerful nation on earth. The symposium compels us to rethink the geography of American slavery, not merely where it took place but also where the fruits of human bondage were reaped.
Tiny Rhode Island offers vital insight: After nearly a century of selling indigenous captives into Caribbean slavery, Rhode Islanders turned their attention to the transatlantic slave trade in the 18th century, generating unprecedented prosperity in Newport and Providence. After independence, the state was the site of the country’s first mills and factory villages, rendering the white sons and daughters of the New England countryside into hyper-exploited factory laborers weaving the raw materials picked by expropriated African slave labor into finished goods. Indeed, the intertwined economies of plantation slavery with New England shipping and industry built some of Rhode Island’s most important institutions, including Brown University. Might it make sense to see New England as a node in the Atlantic plantation complex, as a remote but indispensable outpost in a broader system of human commodification, and ultimately as slavery's hinterland?
The event will explore the entangled histories of slavery and capitalism: stretching from African and indigenous slavery in New England to the Haitian Revolution, the industrial revolution, the transformation of Indian territories into plantation states, and the sex trade in antebellum New Orleans—and also how our public institutions remember and reproduce the past.
Presented by Jacobin’s The Dig podcast, The Center for Reconciliation, and Brown University’s History Department, Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy, Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, Department of Africana Studies, and Swearer Center, Blackstone Valley Tourism Council, Blackstone Valley Visitor Center and Old Slater Mill National Historic Landmark. With support from the Rhode Island Council of Humanities.