Caribbean Studies Network Talk
PASSAGE: Atlantic Crossings, Archival Connections, and the Eighteenth-Century Slave Trade
PASSAGE (Partnership for Atlantic Slavery, Scholarship, Archiving, and Global Exchange) is a research project led by The National Archives and funded by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation. The project brings together historical research into collections held at The National Archives and Lloyd’s Register with an international research mobility programme designed to centre the work of scholars and archivists in West Africa and the Caribbean. The project’s archival strand seeks to recover and foreground the human dimensions of the Middle Passage by interrogating underexplored record series at The National Archives. Its international component aims to provide financial support for research into the history of slavery being undertaken in regions affected by the continued legacies of the trafficking of enslaved Africans to the Caribbean.
This paper offers an overview of the PASSAGE project - its archival ambitions and international objectives - before turning to a close examination of newly identified records of enslaved resistance within The National Archives. By charting the trajectory of one specific ship, the Matty, this paper interrogates the limits of the archive, questioning what aspects of enslavement can - and cannot - be recovered through documentary sources alone.
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Arranged by the Caribbean Studies Network, the Race and Resistance Network and CaribOx.
Image: Ships in stormy seas from Jean Barbot’s Journal (1688), MPI 1/493, The National Archives
