Black Thought in European History

• Published in: European history quarterly Vol. 53; no. 1; pp. 21 - 25
• Main Author: Ireton, Chloe L.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01.01.2023; Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: Black people; Early modern period; European history; Freedoms; History of ideas; Intellectualism; Slavery
• DOI: 10.1177/02656914221143667
• ISSN: 0265-6914

Our work in centring Blackness in European history must go beyond tracing the presence of Black Africans and their descendants, and instead move towards investigating their intellectual, political, social, and cultural histories and legacies. An example of the critical need to move beyond a cataloguing of Black presence towards a deeper understanding of intellectual legacies can be seen in the intellectual history of slavery and freedom, two concepts and legal categories that regulated the lives of all Black men and women in early modern European history, especially in the Iberian empires. These categories were central to the lives of every Black African and person of African descent residing in Europe in the era of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. In contemporary scholarship, however, intellectual histories of ideas about slavery rarely include how Black Africans thought about and reckoned with the discourses that structured their own enslavement, or how they sought to shape the meanings of freedom. Instead, intellectual histories of slavery tend to focus solely on ideas that emerged within legislative or theological spheres in Western European thought, while disregarding how enslaved Africans may have engaged with, shaped or redefined such discourses. In other words, there is an epistemic erasure from intellectual histories of slavery of enslaved people’s engagements with (or ideas about) the religious or legal discourses that structured the legality of their own enslavement in jurisdictions of European polities and empires.