In 1662, the colony of Virginia passed a law that changed the future of slavery in North America. It declared that the status of a child would be determined by the condition of the mother. If an enslaved African...
In 1890, a Black American travelled deep into Central Africa expecting to witness one of Europe’s great civilizing projects. Instead, he encountered forced labour, violence and terror that would become one of the greatest scandals of European colonialism. His...
Slavery produced countless victims and countless perpetrators. Most slave owners faded into obscurity, but Edwin Epps remains infamous because one of the men he enslaved survived to tell the world exactly what happened on his plantation. His memoir, Twelve...
When most people think about colonialism, they picture stolen gold, enslaved people, rubber plantations, diamonds, and vast territories carved up by European empires. Few realize that one of colonialism’s most disturbing legacies wasn’t buried beneath the ground; it was...
When European powers carved Africa into colonies in the late nineteenth century, they faced an immediate economic problem: the people they intended to exploit had no reason to work for them. Africans across the continent were largely self-sufficient, farming...
In eighteenth century Britain, William Beckford stood among the most powerful men in London. He rose to become Lord Mayor twice, sat in Parliament, and built a public image as a defender of liberty. But behind his political fame...
In the decades before the American Civil War, many slaveholders defended slavery through politics, religion, and economics. Few did so more effectively than Thomas Roderick Dew. A professor at the College of William & Mary and later its president,...
Gungunhana, often called the Lion of Gaza, was one of the last major African rulers to resist European colonial conquest in southeastern Africa. He ruled the powerful Gaza Empire, which covered large parts of present-day Mozambique and portions of...
In 1829, a free Black abolitionist living in Boston published a pamphlet that would send waves of fear through parts of slaveholding America. It was not a government report, a newspaper investigation, or a speech from a famous politician....
In the early twentieth century, as the Herero and Nama genocide was still unfolding in German South West Africa, present-day Namibia, another form of violence was taking root across farms and settler communities. Among the men who would later...
