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INTRODUCTION: Rethinking Place, Time and Subjectivity in Atlantic World Slave Societies

In 1980, historian Ira Berlin argued that ‘slave life . . . differed from place to place and from time to time’. The elegant simplicity of Berlin’s now famous argument resulted in a paradigmatic shift in how a generation of historians understood North American slavery in relation to the broader history of the transatlantic slave trade and slave societies throughout the Atlantic World. Indeed, Berlin’s place–time conceptualisation has inspired an ever-growing genre of Atlantic World slavery studies. From monographs, scholarly essays and anthologies, to entire journals devoted to the Atlantic World – such as the peer-reviewed Atlantic Studies, which published its first issue in 2004 – the study of Atlantic World slavery has flourished. Building on Berlin’s insights, historians have produced some inspired works of scholarship that, in addition to slavery, encompass myriad historical experiences in an Atlantic World context. David Armitage, for example, has added to our conceptual understanding of Atlantic World history; John Thornton blazed new historiographical trails with his analysis of Africans in the Atlantic World; and Alison Games and Alden T. Vaughan have provided us with fascinating insights into the migration of Europeans and Native Americans back-and-forth across the Atlantic Ocean. The essays in this Forum aim to build on this rich and innovative scholarship. In March 2009, the participants in this Forum met at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland for a one-day symposium entitled ‘The Cultures of Atlantic World Slavery’. The symposium, sponsored by the Centre for Cultural History at the University of Aberdeen, was designed to interrogate recent historiographical trends in the history of Atlantic World slavery, with a particular focus on slavery in the British Atlantic. Specifically, we were interested in rethinking the historical utility of Berlin’s time– place conceptualisation, especially as it related to cultural formation and individual Slavery & Abolition Vol. 32, No. 2, June 2011, pp. 165–167