Event Description
For more than 150 years, the Iberian powers dominated the forced transport of enslaved Africans to the Americas, before northwestern European powers emerged as prominent actors in the second half of the seventeenth century. Much of the historiography has focused on the Anglo-American slave trade, but that is slowly changing. This talk, drawn from a chapter of his book manuscript on the history of the Cuban slave trade, uses the well-known 1619 disembarkation of enslaved people in Virginia as a point of departure to situate that landmark within the broader Atlantic framework of human trafficking. Adopting a multi-continental perspective encompassing Europe, Africa, and the Americas, it examines the formative era of what historians have called the largest forced migration in human history. The presentation traces the commercial operations, multinational actors, and interconnected systems that set this machinery in motion and fueled its rapid expansion in the decades surrounding the 1619 landing in JamestownSpeaker
Jorge Felipe-Gonzalez is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at San Antonio, specializing in the transatlantic slave trade, Caribbean and Latin American history, Public History, and Digital Humanities. Born and raised in Havana, Cuba, Felipe-Gonzalez is currently completing his first book manuscript, “The Cuban Slave Trade: An Atlantic History,” scheduled for submission at the end of 2025. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and The Journal of African History. Since 2014, he has served as an editor and contributor to both the Transatlantic and Intra-American Slave Trade Databases. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University (2019–2020 and 2023–2024), he has collaborated in digital initiatives, including the development of “The People of the Atlantic Slave Trade” project and the integration of AI tools into database infrastructure. He is also the recipient of multiple research grants, such as funding from the Australian Research Council, to support a multinational collaborative project on the forced transportation of South Pacific Islanders to Cuba.
Co-sponsorship
Presented by the Berkeley Latin American and Caribbean History (BLACH) Working Group, supported by CLACS.