Conceptual Clarity, Please! On the Uses and Abuses of the Concepts of ‘Slave’ and ‘Trade’ in the Study of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery

Abstract

In the material real world the transatlantic ‘slave’ trade and slavery took place between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries. However, the issues surrounding the transatlantic slave trade and slavery have become far more enduring than many people thought. This is true in the academy and scholarship, and it is also true in a wide range of public institutions and in a wide range of communities. This chapter is an attempt to contribute to, and address, some of the questions related to why the issues surrounding the transatlantic slave trade and slavery have not yet gone away. And why they are not likely to go away anytime soon. At the surface it is a paradox that the further we get from Atlantic slavery the more efforts are made to remember it, to commemorate it and to force it into the public realm (Small, 1994; Nimako and Willemsen, 2011; Nimako and Small, 2012). This is true in the Netherlands right now, just as it was true in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, and in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s (Small, 1994). One reason for this is that by the time slavery was legally abolished, the enslaved had already been labelled, represented and misrepresented. It thus appears that to address the question of how to deal with this history is more relevant than how to bury this history. This is true for the case of career historians.