The Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery: New Directions in Teaching and Learning

The Harriet Tubman Institute and the Slave Route Project have announced the launching on 16 April at UNESCO headquarters a new title in the Harriet Tubman Series on the African Diaspora: “The Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery: New Directions in Teaching and Learning”.

Edited by Paul E. Lovejoy and Benjamin Bowser, this book is an anthology of papers from an international workshop that the Slave Route Project jointly organized in November 2010 in Toronto, Canada, with the Harriet Tubman institute and the Canadian Commission for UNESCO, in order to define new approaches for teaching the slave trade and slavery and to examine the psychological consequences of this history.

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International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition

“By its decision to proclaim 23 August each year as the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition, UNESCO sought to pay tribute to the tireless struggle of the slaves for their freedom.

The uprising that took place on the island of Santo Domingo (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic) during the night of 22 to 23 August 1791 shook the slave system radically and irreversibly and provided the impetus for the process which would eventually lead to the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.”
Koïchiro Matsuura, Director-General of UNESCO, 23 August 2002

"Unfinished Business: A Comparative Survey of Historical and Contemporary Slavery"

Unfinished Business was commissioned by UNESCO’s Slave Route project and prepared by Joel Quirk of the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE, U.K).

The publication is divided into five chapters:

• defining slavery in all its forms;
  
• presenting data on the scale of slavery, slave trading and other forms of human bondage;
  
• examining differences and similarities between historical and contemporary practices;
  
• identifying, via case studies in the United States, Saint Domingue/Haiti, Great Britain and Portugal, the main paths through which abolition of slavery has historically occurred; and,
  
• through a further series of case studies, exploring the key limitations of the legal abolition of slavery.

This book combines history and sociology to provide the reader with an understanding of the current problems of slavers (and there are tens of millions of slaves in the world) in their historical context.

Slavery may have been legally abolished around the world, but it remains “a widespread and deeply rooted component on contemporary life” concludes the first-ever comparative analysis of historical slave systems and modern forms of human bondage, published online today by UNESCO.

Click here to download the 141 page report.

200th Anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade

Source: Locke and Slavery

August 23rd is the day marked by UNESCO to commemorate the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. On March 2, 1807, the U.S. Congress approved an act to abolish the importation of slaves effective January 1, 1808. Thus, this year marks the 200th anniversary of that event.

Here are a number of useful resources available related to the anniversary celebration:

• The Global Slavery Rememberance website
• The U.S.National Commission Rememberance website
• UNESCO's Slave Trade Archives
• The Breaking the Silence project website. The project was created to help educators break the silence about the slave trade.
• ASPNet Breaking the Silence, a website created for the Associated Schools Project Network to facilitate teaching about the slave trade in those schools.