Bonds and bondage: the transatlantic slave trade, dispossession, and financial investment at the University of Cambridge

While enslaved people were completely dispossessed of all property and indeed dispossessed of their liberty, these people who suffered some of the shortest life spans in history were the core collateral for some of the most durable, venerable assets in modern history.  Evidence of the many uses of colonial financial instruments in the accounts of the University of Cambridge and its colleges suggests the need to reconsider slavery’s relationship to capitalism.  


Sabine Cadeau is an Associate Professor of History at McGill University. Her first book More Than a Massacre: Racial Violence and Citizenship in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands (2022) won the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Book Award and the Raphael Lemkin Book Award from the Institute for the Study of Genocide.  Her second book, Bonds and Bondage: Financial Capitalism and the Legacies of Atlantic Slavery at the University of Cambridge (forthcoming) emerges from the commissioned University of Cambridge Legacies of Enslavement Inquiry that began in 2019. It is a study of the University of Cambridge’s multiple relationships with slave trading companies such as the East India Company, The Royal African Company, and especially the South Sea Company. 

All welcome- this seminar is free to attend, but booking is required.