Course Catalogue

View Specification Document | Reading List

In this course, students will engage with the history of resistance to slavery and the slave trade through re-interpretation of material culture, engagement with the method of speculative fiction, and a series of case studies from Africa to the Americas. These case studies will provide the basis for discussion comparative approaches to systems of slavery; exploring the question of 'agency' in the historical of experiences of enslavement, and the role played by enslaved people in the abolition of slavery.

The course will engage with how these histories have been displayed or occluded in public spaces, museums and heritage projects. By experiment with digital methods, students will gain hands-on experience of creating new digital resources about slave resistance.

10 x 2 hour seminars over 10 weeks hybrid learning.

Standard entry to Masters at College level.

HIST5190

None

Presentation (10 minutes) - 10%

Blog post (1000 words) -30%

Essay (3000 words) - 60%

This course aims to:

■ Analyse a number of examples of enslaved resistance across a wide range of geographic and cultural settings

■ Critically evaluate some of the key challenges that historians face in analysing primary sources related to slavery and the representation of enslaved people, including the use of databases

■ Explore the 'unintended outcomes' of abolition legislation

■ Offer practice handling archival and other primary sources related to slavery in a critical manner

■ Examine the intersections between historical approaches to the study of slavery, and approaches to 'Modern Slavery'

By the end of this course students will be able to:

■ Appraise key theoretical and historiographic issues concerning the study of slavery and the experiences of enslaved people of African descent;

■ Discuss shifts in attitudes towards slavery and enslaved people, and the role enslaved resistance played in those changes;

■ Critically evaluate and interpret primary sources related to slavery and slave resistance, and integrate them into analysis of secondary historical writings to produce informed conclusions on a given case study;

■ Analyse the various controversies that surround legal, economic and social debate on the legacies of slavery and representations of enslaved people;

■ Propose informed conclusions about how slavery shaped societies, and the long-term legacies for people of slave descent in different contexts

Students must submit at least 75% by weight of the components (including examinations) of the course's summative assessment.