Hosted by New York University’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Tuesday Feb. 1, 2022 12:30pm – 2:00pm
Register Here
Abraham Liddell, Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Columbia University will present the talk “Cape Verde and the Early Modern Black Atlantic” as a part of the lecture series “Charting the Portuguese Black Atlantic” at New York University.
Co-Sponsored by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies(CLACS), the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora (CSAAD), the Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics, and the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center(KJCC).
Abstract:
Through Portuguese settlement in the fifteenth century, the Cape Verde islands became a launch base for trade between Europe and West Africa. By the sixteenth century, Cape Verde stood at the nexus of trade in enslaved Africans and goods between sub-Saharan Africa and the broader Atlantic world, including Portugal and Spain’s American colonies. In this talk, I examine Cape Verde’s critical role in the development of an early Black Lusophone Atlantic through analyzing the social networks of the free and enslaved Africans that lived, worked, and were sold as captives there. Examining Black Atlantic history through a social network lens offers historians another way to consider how social connections affected the rational choices that free and enslaved Black people made about their lives.
Bio:
Abraham Liddell’s research uses data science methods to examine the lives of free and enslaved Africans and their descendants in the early modern Atlantic world. He received his PhD in Latin American History from Vanderbilt University, where he also served as a fellow in the Center for Digital Humanities. He is currently conducting research in the Data Science Institute at Columbia University as a postdoctoral scholar.
I really wanted to listen to the program about Cape Verdi and the Atlantic trade. The presenter spoke so quickly when he read that I could not understand very much of what he was saying. If the program is in print form will it we made available? Dorothy Grannell
Hi Dorothy. We did not host that event, we just helped to spread the word. You should contact the event organizer to inquire about a recording. Good luck!