Let me begin by thanking Adrienne Davis, of the OAH Program Committee, who came up with the idea of a broad plenary session devoted to slavery, and helped shepherd the process along; and the OAH for its generous assistance in bringing these scholars together today.

When I was first approached about this panel, my first thought was: to what extent is there such a thing as “the field of slavery studies”? Knowing a little about studies of slavery in Southeast Asia , Russia , and elsewhere, I wondered whether “States of the Fields” might better reflect the situation. Do people working on West Africa , for example, think of “slave culture” as a form of resistance, the way that many Americanists do? Why did static pictures of slavery persist so long in writings on Africa and the U.S. ? If there is such a creature as “slavery studies” then surely it has been deeply nurtured by what four generations of historians have said about the African diaspora in the Atlantic World. Our gathering today provides an opportunity, among other things, to see how “slavery” has provided—and might in future provide—a basis for intellectual inquiry in this broad sweep of time, space, and peoples.

I think it’s fair to say that the scholars at this table are among the leading thinkers on slavery in five broad regions of this “Atlantic World”:

·   David Brion Davis is Sterling Professor of History at Yale and the founding director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery and Abolition. Ranging from a ninth-century slave revolt to the medieval Mediterranean to the eighteenth-century philosophes, David Davis’s pathbreaking books have traced changing ideologies, cultures, and intellectual debates over slavery and antislavery, especially in Europe and North America . His two most recent works are In the Image of God and Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery.

·   Keila Grinberg is Associate Professor at the University of Rio de Janeiro and the Instituto Candido Mendes ( Brazil ). Keila works on comparative slavery and Brazilian history; one of her recent articles compared how courts in Brazil and the U.S. dealt with freedom lawsuits lodged by slaves. Her most recent book is O Fiador dos Brasileiros:  Escravidão e Direito Civil no Tempo de Antonio Pereira Rebouças (Slavery and Civil Law in Nineteenth-Century Brazil); and (with Sue Peabody) Slavery, Freedom, and the Law in the Americas is forthcoming with Bedford Books.

·   Walter Johnson, Associate Professor of History and American Studies at New York University, has written widely on U.S. legal, social, cultural history, and he is currently at work on a study of culture and trade on the Nineteenth Century Mississippi River. Soul by Soul (1999) won several major prizes from the OAH, SHEAR, ASA, and SHA.  

·   Martin Klein, of the University of Toronto History Department, who has written or co-edited numerous books, is one of the foremost scholars on slavery and emancipation in Africa . His most recent book won wide acclaim, and Honorable Mention from the African Studies Association’s Melville Herskovits Prize, Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa, surveys the intertwined histories of slavery and French colonial rule in the vast, diverse region called “ French West Africa .”

·   Jennifer Morgan ( Rutgers Univ. ) writes on comparative slavery, African-American women’s History, and the colonial Caribbean . Her 1997 article on the Gendering of Racial Ideology is rapidly becoming a classic. Her highly anticipated new book, Laboring Women ( Univ. of Pennsylvania Press ), establishes reproduction and gender firmly at the center of the study of slavery.

Each of their papers grapples with two general historiographic questions: Where has the study of slavery been in your field, and where is it headed? What scholarly traditions or literatures have contributed to—and benefited from—the study of slavery in your field?

In a setting like this, the theme is always huge and the presentations are short. This, of course, is part of the fun. And by widening our view outside North America we have made the “big picture” even bigger—maybe scarily so. Scholarship on slavery has grown so much that a single region can build up a daunting historiography. Multiply that by an entire hemisphere and you will see what we are about to attempt! But I can think of no better team to tackle a hemisphere’s worth of historiography than the five scholars at this table. Our goal here is to foster a lively conversation among different scholarly communities, some of which do not normally interact much. Rather than specialization, the emphasis is on conversation, connection, and opening outward. And so, rather than a commenter, we have reserved a full hour for audience discussion. We hope that our remarks will only prime the pump for a rollicking conversation to follow.