The Affective and Material Continuities of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

This project explores how the physical infrastructures of the transatlantic slave trade, such as coastal forts in Ghana, plantation landscapes in the Caribbean, and the routes that connected them, materially enabled European colonial expansion and the development of global capitalism. Combining archaeology, archival research, ethnography, and decolonial approaches, it examines how these sites were designed to organize forced labor and profit, and how their material traces still structure environments and economies today. The project seeks to understand how the histories of enslavement became embedded in architecture and landscape, and how these legacies continue to inform present-day social and political realities.

Project team

• Prof. Dr. Jonas Bens, University of Hamburg
• Dr. Christian Mader, University of Bonn
• Bille Sachers, B.A., University of Hamburg
• Philip Atta Mensah, M.A., University of Bonn
• Arjunraj Shakeela Natarajan, M.A., University of Hamburg
• Ebenezer Mensah Gyimah, M.A., Auckland University of Technology

Funding

• Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Heisenberg-Förderung "Die materielle Kultur der kolonialen Gegenwart: Kolonialismus, Kapitalismus und Recht")
• Cluster of Excellence at the Bonn Center for Dependency & Slavery Studies