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Global Abolitionisms Network established

Dr. Maartje Janse (History) and Prof.dr. Gert Oostindie (History, KITLV) have been awarded a seed grant for: "Global Abolitionisms Network", which will link scholars from across the world and across disciplines who are working on antislavery activism and abolitionism. Granted: €5000 (September 2015).

Project Coordinators: 
Dr. Maartje Janse (Institute for History) 
Prof. Gert Oostindie (Institute for History, and Director of KITLV)

The Global Abolitionisms Network has been established to link scholars from across the world and across disciplines who are working on antislavery activism and abolitionism. Through collaboration in seminars, conferences, edited volumes and joint grant proposals it is our ambition to develop and offer new understandings of the history of abolition. Although a tremendous amount of work has been done on this topic, there is room for innovation and integration of national case studies in a broader transnational and interdisciplinary perspective. The global history of abolitionism takes as its point of departure two ideas:

1) The attempts to end the slave trade and slavery were fundamentally different in character geographically and chronologically, and that we should speak of abolitionisms rather than abolitionism, however,

2) different abolitionisms have shaped each other, throughout space and time. To truly understand the historical development of the struggle against slave trade and slavery we need an integrated approach that respects the diversity of  protest forms, many of which are too often discarded in the dominant perspective.

This network is a Leiden initiative, part of the Leiden Slavery Studies Association, and will be coordinated from Leiden for at least 3 years (currently by Maartje Janse). The network is organized by 3 more scholars:

Peter Stamatov, historical sociologist (Yale) 
Angela Alonso, historical sociologist (Sao Paulo) 
Richard Huzzey, historian (Liverpool), co-director Centre for the Study of International Slavery. 

Our first priorities are creating a website and a mailing list. In November the Global Abolitions Network will be launched by hosting a roundtable at the Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association, in Baltimore. In 2016 we will host a symposium, and a year later an international conference on Global Abolitionisms will be organized.

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