Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance

Longlisted for the 2024 Berger Prize.

An important illustrated history of the relationship between Cambridge and the Black Atlantic.

Between 1400 and 1900, European powers, not least Britain, colonised the Americas and transported over 12.5 million people from sub-Saharan Africa as slaves. The contested space, formed by the interactions of multiple people and cultures, both Black and white, we now call the Black Atlantic. Cambridge and Cambridgeshire played a key role in this international narrative - a story of commerce, profit and colonialism, of opinion-forming, and of struggle.

Through the lens of historic artworks, artefacts and natural history specimens, this book and the exhibition it accompanies analyse the rise and growth of enslavement, the profits made by Dutch and British traders and plantation-owners, the power of images, the knowledge produced by enslaved people, histories of resistance movements and the consequences of these events today. Works by contemporary makers challenge long-held assumptions, address erasures, and create alternative narratives of repair, freedom and justice.


About the Author

Jake Subryan Richards is Assistant Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research and teaching concerns the histories of the people of the African diaspora, Atlantic empires, and enslavement and emancipation.

Victoria Avery has been Keeper of European Sculpture & Decorative Arts at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, since 2010, prior to which she was Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Warwick.