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How have African Atlantic artists transformed our understanding of slavery’s legacy? Drawing on Rice’s three decades of experience as an academic and curator, including work with the Whitworth Art Gallery, Lancaster Maritime Museum, and the International Slavery Museum, this lecture explores how artists from the 1950s to the 2020s, such as Althea McNish, Lubaina Himid, Ellen Gallagher, Jade de Montserrat, and Lela Harris, have used their art to interrogate slavery’s history and its aftermath. Alan Rice will show how their radical interventions and acts of guerrilla memorialisation have reshaped museums, challenged dominant narratives, and redefined the field of the Black Atlantic.

Beyond chattel slavery, who really built the global plantation complex? This lecture takes a global, longue durée approach, challenging the assumption that plantations relied solely on chattel slavery. Randy M. Browne reveals that planters were insidiously flexible, extracting labor from a wide variety of coerced workers, including convicts, indentured servants, and nominally free wage laborers across the Americas, the Indian Ocean, and Australia. What united these workers was the shared experience of forced migration, dispossession, and crushing violence.

Before transatlantic slavery, European colonial powers used contract workers. After Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807/08, they sought new markets, especially in Latin America, and needed a wage-earning population. By the 1820s–30s, the idea of wage slavery emerged. In 1834, the British introduced the apprenticeship system in their colonies, a compromise with slave owners, until it collapsed in 1838 due to resistance. Still, it inspired the Indentured Labour System, bringing hundreds of thousands of Asian, African, and European contract workers to Caribbean plantations between 1833–1873. This lecture explores how brutal labor systems shaped global market development, focusing on Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and Curaçao.