The Centre hosts the Annual Lecture in the History of Slavery, which has run since 2012. Each year a guest lecturer presents research that furthers our understanding of the history of slavery and its wider impacts. Some of the lectures have been recorded and can be viewed by clicking on the links below. The 2024 Lecture: The Problem of African Slavery in the Age of Abolition The next Annual Lecture in the History of Slavery will be given by Professor Benedetta Rossi on 'The problem of African slavery in the age of abolition'. This will take place on Thursday 17 October.The global movement to abolish first the slave trade and then slavery in Africa has been studied as driven by Europe, primarily Britain. The historiography of abolitionism focuses on European, American, and to a lesser extent, Caribbean actors. Africans feature in it as either victims or perpetrators. This lecture will take a different perspective, and approach ‘the problem of African slavery’ as an African problem. It will contextualise different African problematisations of slavery in the framework of changing global abolitionist strategies throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will consider what slavery meant to different groups engaged in its suppression. It will examine how the rationales that supported the slave trade and slavery were progressively refuted, where, when, why, by whom, and with what consequences in African societies. Image More on the lecture Previous lectures in this distinguished series have been delivered by the following speakers, and you can watch recordings of some of the lectures at the links: Professor Daniel Lord Smail (Harvard)Professor David Richardson (Hull)Professor John Cairns (Edinburgh)Professor Walter Scheidel (Stanford)Professor Sir Hilary Beckles (UWI)Professor Philip Morgan (Johns Hopkins University)Professor Vincent Brown (Harvard)Professor Jennifer Morgan (New York)Professor Ana Lucia Araujo (Howard)Professor Indrani Chatterjee (Texas)Professor Brenda Stevenson (Oxford) This article was published on 2024-08-01