Bonds and Bondage: The University of Cambridge and The Financial Legacies of Atlantic Slavery

About the Presentation

Unlike previous studies of universities’ involvements in Atlantic slavery that deal mainly with particular plantations, private transactions, and private fortunes, Bonds and Bondage shifts the scholarly debate on slavery and the university by focusing on stocks and bonds. Sources detailing the many uses of colonial financial instruments from the South Sea Company, East India Company and Royal African Company suggest the need to reconsider slavery’s historical relationship to capitalism. I emphasize that fully a century before slavery helped to fund heavy industry as Eric Williams famously argues, Atlantic slavery was a crucial part of the financial revolution as stocks and bonds in slave trading companies were cornerstones of the early public exchanges. In this talk I discuss the historical uses of these financial instruments at the University of Cambridge and its constituent colleges from the early eighteenth century through the present, and I demonstrate that this enduring wealth remains highly legible in the institutional fabric of contemporary economic life.

About the Presenter

Sabine Cadeau is a historian of Modern Latin America and the Caribbean at McGill University. Her first book More Than a Massacre: Racial Violence and Citizenship in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands was published by the University of Cambridge Press Afro-Latin America series. In 2023, More than a Massacre was awarded the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Book Award and the Raphael Lemkin Book Award from the Institute for the Study of Genocide. Her second manuscript, Bonds and Bondage: Financial Capitalism and the Legacies of Atlantic Slavery at the University of Cambridge is forthcoming with the University of Cambridge Press. This manuscript emerged from the commissioned University of Cambridge Legacies of Enslavement Inquiry that began in 2019. It is a study of the University of Cambridge’s multiple relationships with slave trading companies such as the East India Company, The Royal African Company, and especially the South Sea Company.