This book sheds new light on domestic forced migration by examining the experiences of American-born slave migrants from a comparative perspective.

The Leiden Slavery Studies Association (LSSA) is dedicated to promoting a greater understanding of slavery and post-slavery in any period and any geographical region.

This series provides a venue for scholarly work—research monographs and edited volumes—that advances our understanding of the history of slavery and post-slavery in any period and any geographical region. It fills an important gap in academic publishing and builds upon two relatively recent developments…

Conference, Histories Connected: Faculty Roundtable

The Leiden Slavery Studies Association (LSSA) is dedicated to promoting a greater understanding of slavery and post-slavery in any period and any geographical region.

The Journal of Global Slavery (JGS) aims to advance and promote a greater understanding of slavery and post-slavery from comparative, transregional, and/or global perspectives. It especially underscores the global and globalizing nature of slavery in world history.

During the Slavery Memorial Year, from 1 July 2023 to 1 July 2024, the Kingdom of the Netherlands will reflect on its colonial and slavery history.

The colonial and slavery past is an important theme in education and research at Leiden University. Particular attention is also paid to structural abuses that arose from this history and that often still persist in the present day.

How did slaves in the eighteenth century manage to empower themselves and their kin, and why did this become all the more difficult in the nineteenth century?

The interdisciplinary minor American Studies offers a survey of U.S. history, literature and culture from the establishment of the first colonies on the North American continent in the 15th century to the present.

The Leiden Slavery Studies Association cooperates with the following partners:

These four volumes offer students and researchers a rich collection of published works on the history of slavery works by some of the most preeminent scholars in the field.

Where did the new generation of antislavery activists get their inspiration to organize in large-scale pressure groups?

Lecture, Histories Connected: Special Guest Lecture

The master’s programme in North American Studies at Leiden University takes a multidisciplinary approach to the study of the United States, with a particular emphasis on examining key aspects of American history, culture, and literature.

Forgotten Lineages explores the paths through which generations of formally enslaved and their descendants gradually forgot their past of enslavement under Dutch and British imperial rule and became local subjects in Sri Lanka and South Africa. It explores why and how forgetting rather than memory became…

What did it mean to be enslaved in in the Indian Ocean world in the 18th and 19th centuries? Over the last decades, historians have mined French, British, Portuguese and Dutch records for quantitative data on the European slave trade. This project focuses on the experience of being a slave and seeks…

An international congress, lectures and a new book series and magazine. It’s a hot topic at the moment that attracts broad public interest. Researchers, from historians to legal experts, are bringing together their expertise in the Leiden Slavery Studies Association.

In Slaving Zones: Cultural Identities, Ideologies, and Institutions in the Evolution of Global Slavery, fourteen authors—including both world-leading and emerging historians of slavery—engage with the ‘Slaving Zones’ theory.

Are you thinking about studying North American Studies? Learn more and watch the introduction video and the programme presentation.

Latin America is a region with an immense cultural diversity and a colorful, fascinating and sometimes complicated past and present. Get to know the culture, history and the Spanish or Portuguese language of Latin America and develop yourself into a valuable region specialist with a critical worldvi…

Unlike most city histories, this book focuses exclusively on the city’s connections with colonialism and slavery.

The master’s programme of Latin American Studies offered by Leiden University supports the teaching and research of the social, cultural, historical, and linguistic diversity of contemporary Latin America, a region of mind-blowing diversity and global impact.

Being a Slave brings together scholars and writers who try to come to terms with the histories and legacies of European slavery in the Indian Ocean.

The two-year interdisciplinary research master’s in Latin American Studies addresses cutting-edge debates on the social and cultural issues in present-day Latin America and the Caribbean region.

The NWO-funded Vidi project “American foreign policy and liberalism” challenges the idea that the United States has created and sustained a “liberal international order” since World War II. It instead explores the ways in which illiberal ideologies – such as those underpinning racial hierarchy at home…

How do we account for historical power dynamics when writing new histories of slavery and emancipation? What critical methods can we employ when studying preserved archives and collections? A new book series aims to address these questions. The initiators Karwan Fatah-Black and Ilse Josepha Lazaroms…

Covering all seven countries on the isthmus, this volume presents the first collection of original linguistic studies on Central American Spanish varieties, which have long been neglected in Hispanic Linguistics.

Are you thinking about studying Latin American Studies? Learn more and watch the introduction video and the programme presentation.

This book explores how public health concerns and political agendas influenced each other in the US over the past century.

This project applies a social-historical approach to examine and contrast various groups of African-American slave refugees who sought freedom within North America between 1800 and 1860. It innovatively distinguishes between different “spaces of freedom” for runaway slaves, namely sites of formal, semi-formal,…

On 1 July – Keti Koti, in the year ahead, our university community will be able to reflect extensively on the history of slavery by engaging in research, education and many other activities.

The excuses for the slavery past? It would have been better if the cabinet had taken some more time on that, thinks university lecturer and Atlantic slavery expert Karwan Fatah-Black. 'Too bad they didn’t wait for the results of the study.'

What do the cloth trade and slavery have to do with each other? Quite a lot, as it turns out, as by history student Sjoerd Ramackers demonstrated in his bachelor’s thesis. He reveals that cloth merchant Daniel van Eijs was closely associated with four plantations in Berbice, a former Dutch colony on…

Professor Nira Wickramasinghe will research forgotten lineages with an NWO Open Competition grant, in particular the afterlife of Dutch slavery in the Indian Ocean World.

Many traces of the city's slavery history can be found in Leiden but the public isn't always aware of them. The initiators of 'Mapping Slavery in Leiden' want to change this with guided tours and street markers. Representatives of the University and other Leiden institutions will be giving the first…

How was FDR's image constructed—by himself and others—as such a powerful icon in American memory?

When we think of the history of Dutch slavery, the areas that spring to mind are primarily the Antilles and Suriname. However, until the end of the eighteenth century there were also Dutch plantation colonies in neighbouring Guyana. Bram Hoonhout’s book ‘Borderless Empire’ describes this forgotten h…

Drawing on the analogical lessons of the Great War, this article uses applied history to analyze how the four parallels discerned can help us make sense of contemporary Sino-American rivalry

How to related figures of savages to conceptions of history?

On December 18th, Viktorija Kostadinova succesfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Viktorija on this great result.

This dissertation studies the construction of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a cultural icon in American memory, particularly by FDR himself.

Part of ‘Moralising Misfortune: A comparative anthropology of commercial insurance’, an ERC Consolidator project of Erik Bähre.

The presents thesis investigates the extent to which Chinese, Dutch and American speakers of English are mutually intelligible. Intelligibility of vowels, simplex consonants and consonant clusters was tested in meaningless sound sequences, as well as in words in meaningless and meaningful short sent…

Karwan Fatah-Black of Leiden University, an expert in the area of Dutch colonial history, wrote the text for a slavery remembrance memorial that was unveiled on 1 July in Hoofddorp. The official abolition of slavery was proclaimed 155 years ago on 1 July 1863. On Sunday 1 July 2018 the national remembrance…