In its inaugural year, the group convened for monthly meetings to survey the major scholarly approaches to slavery’s financial history. We were delighted to welcome such distinguished scholars as Professor Mary Hicks (University of Chicago), Professor Michael Ralph (Howard University), and Professor Sharon Murphy (Providence College) to the Simmons Center. We also heard from Dr. Jesús Bohorquez and Dr. Télio Cravo, two John Carter Brown Library fellows who pointed our attention to Brazil’s importance in the nineteenth-century’s global financial architecture. 

The cluster has attracted participants from across the Brown campus, including undergraduate and graduate students; postdoctoral researchers; and faculty from History, Economics, and other disciplines. The enterprise was also supported by the work of Isaac Mensah, a doctoral student in History, as well as the Simmons Center staff who coordinated speaker visits and provided delicious refreshments for participants. 

The first year’s work made clear that scholarly and popular understandings of slavery’s financial history are still at an early stage. But the group’s premise that “following the money” will lead to a richer history and unanticipated new stories seems to have found immediate confirmation in (to offer only one example) accounts of slave-mined Brazilian diamonds being used to secure Dutch loans to the Portuguese Crown in pursuit of expanding slave importations to the Americas. 

Our ambitions now turn to mobilizing Brown-affiliated researchers in pursuit of other entangled histories that point to finance as a critical aspect of slavery’s rise and fall in the Western world, as well as to slavery’s importance to the rise of the modern financial sector.