UCL Americas seminar: Making 'Race': the work of the slave-owners

Building on the work of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project this paper will explore the role of the slave-owners in making 'race'. The idea of 'the negro', of 'the slave' and of 'the white man' had to be constructed in the new world of the Atlantic. It was effected through a wide variety of practices - from the selling of African men and women to the making of laws, the discursive construction of racial types and the quotidian doings of the plantation.