Slaves, Silver, and Atlantic Empires (Alex Borucki, UC Irvine)

Please join us for the next meeting of the new Colloquium on Latin American and Caribbean History as we welcome Alex Borucki, who will deliver a talk entitled “Slaves, Silver, and Atlantic Empires: The Slave Trade to Spanish South America, 1700-1810”.

The talk will be held in HSSB 4020 at 5 pm on Wednesday, November 1st, and will be followed by a small reception.

Prof. Borucki has pre-circulated a paper. Please e-mail jcobo@history.ucsb.edu to obtain a copy.

Abstract: This presentation examines the slave voyage conducted by the ship Ascension (1795-1797) connecting Rhode Island, Mozambique, and the Río de la Plata (The River of Silver, today’s Argentina and Uruguay), as a window into the eighteenth-century slave trade to Spanish South America. In this era, the slave trade became the key to accessing Spanish American consumers and silver for foreign traders. As a result, Spanish American silver entered English, Dutch, and Portuguese commercial circuits beneficial to metropolitan merchants and public revenues. The story of the Ascension’s captives goes beyond Anglo-American conceptions of the Middle Passage born out of the triangular trade, as the yearlong ordeal of these Africans involved Indian Ocean embarkation, Atlantic crossing to Montevideo, a journey on oxen-carts throughout the Pampas and on mule-trains across the Andes into Chile, and their final reshipment in the Pacific to Lima.

About the Speaker: Alex Borucki is Associate Professor of History at UC Irvine.