GLC@Lunch with Marc Eagle: “Comparing Archival Perspectives: The Transatlantic Slave Trade from the 16th to the 19th Century”

Marc Eagle (GLC Visiting Scholar; Professor of History, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green)

Archival sources produced across four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade to the Americas both illuminate and obscure the evolution of this traffic in African captives. The kind and quantity of sources available changes substantially over time, reflecting shifts in slaving patterns while presenting scholars with different methodological challenges and fostering unique sets of assumptions about the slave trade and the experiences of the enslaved. Documents from Yale’s archives offer a useful point of departure for comparing earlier and later sources and understanding how they relate to the broader story of the forced migration of enslaved Africans up to the later nineteenth century.