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Slavery and other forms of unfree labour, 1850-1945
Event details
Black History Month Lecture
This panel discusses two new books on slavery and other forms of unfree labour by York staff: Shane O’Rourke, Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, Princess Isabel and the Ending of Servile Labour in Russia and Brazil (Anthem Impact, 2023) and Henrice Altink, ed. , A Cultural History of Slavery and Human Trafficking, vol. 5 1900-1945 (Bloomsbury, 2024). The authors will present a short overview of their books, which will be followed by a commentary by Professor James Walvin, a leading scholar of slavery, and an opportunity for the audience to ask the authors questions.
There will be a wine reception after the event, hosted by the History Department.
About the speakers
Henrice Altink is a Professor in Modern History, specialising in race, class and gender in the modern Caribbean. She is the author of Representations of Slave Women in Discourses on Slavery and Abolition, 1780-1838 (2007); Destined for a Life of Service: Defining African Jamaican Womanhood, 1865-1938 (2011); Public Secrets: Race and Colour in Colonial and Independent Jamaica (2019) and A Cultural History of Slavery and Human Trafficking, vol. 5 1900-1945 (2024). Her most recent work examines the intersection between social inequalities and environmental change in Jamaica and has appeared, amongst others, in the Journal of Urban History . She is also the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre (IGDC) at the University of York.
Shane O’Rourke is a historian of Russia with a strong interest in the history of Brazil. He has published books on the history of the Cossacks and in Imperial Russia and in the Soviet Union. More recently he has been engaged in writing a comparative history of the emancipation of the serfs in Russia and slaves in Brazil. In the last eighteenth months he has actively engaged in public explanations of Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine.
James Walvin is Professor of History emeritus at York. He is the author of more than 10 books on the slave trade and slavery. His most recent book is A World Transformed: Slavery in the Americas and the Origins of Global power (2022). In 2019-20, he held the position of Distinguished Fellow in the History and Culture of the Americas, at the Huntington Library. He previously held fellowships at Yale University, The University of the West Indies, the Australian National University and the University of Edinburgh. For twenty years he co-edited the journal Slavery and Abolition and he won the prestigious Martin Luther King Memorial Prize for his book Black and White.