TALK: The Celebration of Slavery in the Christian-Muslim World
Robert Davis (History, Ohio State University)
Tuesday, April 15 / 3:30 PM
McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020
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Description: As Americans, we tend to identify slavery with the millions of Africans brought by force to labor in the plantations of the New World. We usually overlook the enslavement of Christians and Muslims in the Mediterranean. This world of slavery, like its trans-Atlantic analogue, took off after 1500, though it peaked sooner (by 1650), setting many of the norms and models that would eventually be adopted by European slave owners in the New World.
This talk will introduce this other very, discuss its extent and influence on its better-known contemporary, and then examine one distinctive aspect of it: how European Christians attempted to turn the often inescapable misfortunes of bondage into a positive sign of Gods grace and Christian community
Robert C. Davis, Professor of History at the Ohio State University, is a specialist in the social and economic history of early-modern Italy and the Mediterranean, with a special focus on the Venetian Republic. He is the author of four monographs and the editor of two collected works, dealing with topics ranging from the Venetian Arsenal, to the history of tourism in Venice. The present talk is drawn on material from his second study on early-modern Mediterranean slavery.
Sponsored by: Mediterranean Studies Research Focus Group, French and Italian Studies Department, UCSB Renaissance Studies Center, UCSB Early Modern Center, Italian Cultural Heritage Foundation of Santa Barbara.
