Atlantic Exchanges 2027
Slavery and the Commercial Machinery of Empires
The Atlantic Exchanges Workshop invites proposals for its second edition, which aims to examine how slavery and the slave trade shaped commercial exchange in the Atlantic world from the sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century.
Scholarship has long demonstrated the centrality of enslaved labor to the development of the Atlantic economies, and the extent and violence of the trade in enslaved people are well documented. However, studies of trans-imperial commerce and those concerning the slave trade have generally proceeded along separate lines. The former considers slaving as just one of many branches of broader commerce, and the latter views the trade as a system in itself. This workshop looks at that history from a closely related yet different angle: how slavery and the slave trade offered pathways for trans-imperial trade, both legal and illegal commerce, mobility, and exchange beyond ostensible imperial boundaries around the Atlantic.
Insisting on the commercial functions of the traffic does not reduce its violence. The privileges, exemptions, and contracts discussed here were tools used in a trade which led to the deportation, death, and dispossession of millions of Africans. The credit, shipping, and market access they brought about were obtained from the labor and lives of the enslaved. The workshop chooses to examine the mechanics of the connection between slavery and the wider system of commercial exchange precisely because those mechanics were inextricably linked to that violence.
We are especially interested in examining slavery and the slave trade as mechanisms which could function as licensed exceptions, commercial and fiscal, within imperial systems. The Atlantic empires often aimed at controlling commerce by means of mercantilist restrictions, monopolies, navigation laws, and bans on foreign trade. At the same time, however, these empires set up exceptions, privileges, contracts, and fiscal incentives with the intention of securing enslaved labor and of encouraging the trafficking of enslaved Africans. Thus, asientos (the contracts for slave trading), licenses, tax exemptions, preferential duties, and other commercial privileges could provide channels of exchange that went well beyond the actual trade in enslaved people.
The trans-Atlantic and intra-American slave trade therefore enabled not only captives, but also commodities, capital, credit, information, and merchants to cross imperial boundaries that commercial regulations had otherwise aimed to preserve. The ships involved in the trade carried provisions, manufactures, colonial products, specie, and other goods, and the clearance of these ships established routes that would not have been authorized by any other type of license. Because of the privileges connected with the slave trade, merchants were given access to ports and markets and used these opportunities to extend their commercial networks. At the same time, imperial governments sometimes relied on foreign slave traders for commodities, shipping capacity, credit, or access to markets that their own commercial systems could not provide adequately.
From this perspective, slavery and the slave trade were not merely branches of Atlantic commerce; they also formed part of the commercial apparatus of Atlantic empires, linking markets and territories that officially fell under different imperial and political systems. The same mechanisms designed to facilitate the trafficking and exploitation of enslaved people could break down mercantilist boundaries, promote exchange between different empires, and produce areas in which merchants were able to navigate, combine, and take advantage of overlapping legal and fiscal systems.
We welcome submissions that examine these dynamics throughout the Atlantic world, in a broad sense, from the late 1500s to the late 1800s. Because the Atlantic Exchanges Workshop has a wide geographic focus, we are particularly interested in studies of West Africa, the Caribbean, and the Río de la Plata/Brazilian port area, as well as papers that link these regions to one another or to other parts of the Atlantic world. The geographic areas mentioned are intended as areas of special interest, not limits on the workshop’s scope.
Rather than viewing the Atlantic empires as distinct commercial systems, the workshop prefers submissions that illustrate the connections between them and how merchants, officials, shipmasters, financiers, enslavers, and others crossed jurisdictional boundaries. We are especially interested in studies that examine the mechanics of exchange, meaning the contracts, privileges, routes, ports, financial instruments, commercial strategies, and legal arrangements that made these links possible.
Possible subjects include, but are by no means limited to:
- slave-trading contracts, asientos, monopolies, licenses, and commercial privileges;
- slavery and the slave trade as vehicles for trans-imperial or trans-polity commerce;
- the commodity trades that moved under cover of slaving voyages;
- merchants who used slave-trading privileges to enter otherwise restricted markets;
- credit, finance, insurance, and fiscal mechanisms connected to slave trading;
- neutral, foreign, illicit, or semi-legal commerce facilitated by the slave trade;
- ports, entrepôts, borderlands, and other spaces in which slave trading intersected with broader commercial exchange;
- enslaved and free Africans and people of African descent as commercial actors within these circuits: mariners, pilots, interpreters, brokers, and traders;
- African, European, Caribbean, North American, and South American commercial networks generated or transformed by the traffic in enslaved people;
- the relationship between mercantilist restrictions and exemptions created to encourage slavery or slave trading;
- the ways commodities produced by enslaved labor facilitated exchanges among different imperial economies;
- the persistence, transformation, or circumvention of these networks during the age of abolition and the illegal slave trade.
We welcome proposals from scholars at different career stages; submissions from advanced graduate students are encouraged,
The workshop will cover lodging expenses and meals for all participants for the duration of the event.
Workshop: March 11–13, 2027, William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia
Proposal deadline: October 31, 2026
Decisions communicated by: November 15, 2026
To apply: Please send a title, a brief abstract of approximately 250 words, and a one-page CV to atlanticexchangeswm@gmail.com.
Paper circulation: Papers will be circulated among participants in advance of the workshop.
Papers may be submitted in English, Spanish, or Portuguese.