Each year a guest lecturer presents research that furthers our understanding of the history of slavery and its impacts. The 2026 Lecture: Silencing the Past: From Haiti to the Peloponnese The 2026 Annual Lecture in the History of Slavery will be delivered by Professor Nino Luraghi (University of Oxford), exploring resistance in the study of ancient slavery. Co-badged by the Edinburgh Classics Research Seminar.Thursday, 5 November, 17:00 | G.159, MacLaren Stuart Room, Old College "In this paper, I confront a challenge to the study of ancient slavery posed by the study of modern resistance and revolts of enslaved people. Scholars studying especially the sugar islands of the Caribbean have come to realize that robust resistance on the part of enslaved people had been marginalized both by contemporary observers and by previous research. Historians of antiquity have also occasionally observed that ancient textual evidence, emanating essentially from the slave-owning class, tends to underrepresent and explain away the more serious forms of resistance, such as flight and revolt. This awareness however has not prevented mainstream scholarship from replicating the tendency of the sources, systematically minimizing the minimalist assessment found in them without any serious attempt at unpacking its ideological presuppositions. The issue at stake is not merely that the sources underplay resistance and historians buy into their bias. The issue – a more fundamental one – is that underplaying resistance is an essential feature for the survival and coherence of any system of enslavement. Seeing this both allows for new readings of ancient resistance and is part of the new readings itself. In my paper, I will offer a preliminary exploration of these points." Nino Luraghi is Wykeham Professor of Ancient History at the University of Oxford. Educated in Italy, he has held academic appointments in Germany, the US, Canada and the UK. He is a social and cultural historian of ancient Greece. His main interests include ancient and modern historiography, sole rulership, ethnicity and the cultural history of enslavement. He is the author of 'The Ancient Messenians: Constructions of Ethnicity and Memory' (Cambridge, 2008) and the editor of 'The Historian’s Craft in the Age of Herodotus' (Oxford, 2001) and of 'The Splendors and Miseries of Ruling Alone' (Stuttgart, 2013). Academic roundtable The research community is also invited to attend a roundtable in connection to the lecture:“Resistance to Enslavement in the Ancient Mediterranean and Modern Atlantic Worlds: Methods and Sources”Friday, 6 November 2026, 11.00 - 13.00 | Seminar Room 1, Chrystal MacMillan BuildingPanel: Nino Luraghi (Oxford), Mirko Canevaro (HCA), Matthew Hewitt (HCA), and Christian Whyte (Glasgow). Chaired by Dr Joseph La Hausse de Lalouvière (HCA). Previous Annual Lectures in the History of Slavery Past Lectures A series of lectures on ‘World Slavery from Antiquity to the Present’ was established in the Scottish Centre for Diaspora Studies in 2012 and has continued under within the ECGH since 2019.2012 – Professor David Richardson (Hull): ‘Why Was the British Slave Trade So Big?’2013 – Professor Walter Scheidel (Stanford): ‘Slavery and Forced Labor in Early China and the Roman World’2013 – Professor Philip Morgan (Johns Hopkins): ‘Caribbean Slavery’2014 – Professor Annette Gordon-Reed (Harvard): ‘The Hemingses of Monticello’2015 – Professor John Cairns (Edinburgh): ‘Manumitting Slaves: Eighteenth-Century Scotland and Ancient Rome’2015 – Professor Sir Hilary Beckles (University of the West Indies): ‘Britain’s Black Debt: Reparatory Justice for Slavery and Genocide in Caribbean Context’2016 – Professor Vincent Brown (Harvard): ‘The Coromantee War: Charting the Course of an Atlantic Slave Revolt’2019 – Professor Jennifer Morgan (New York University): ‘Reckoning With Slavery: Kinship and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic’2021 – Professor Ana Lucia Araujo (Howard): ‘Slavery in the Age of Memory: Britain, France and the United States’2022 – Professor Indrani Chatterjee (UT Austin): ‘Entangled Hierarchies: Of Varna-Jati, Casta and Slaves in Historic South Asia’2023 – Professor Brenda Stevenson (Oxford): ‘Slavery, Family and Resistance’2023 – Professor Daniel Smail (Harvard): ‘Slavery and the Pursuit of Freedom in Later Medieval Mediterranean Europe’2024 – Professor Benedetta Rossi (UCL): ‘The Problem of African Slavery in the Age of Abolition’2025 - Professor Christopher L. Brown (Columbia): 'The Atlantic Slave Trade and the American Revolution' This article was published on Thursday 1 August 2024
