But I’m not appealing to “the judgement of history” because it won’t save any lives now and therefore it isn’t any consolation. I hope the British government I voted for - and the U.S. government I paid taxes to - stop arming war criminals and start using their vast influence for good.

I’m very happy to answer questions about life at A.U.B.G. but in short I like it very much and it’s a great place to work!

I’m confident that one day the war crimes of 2023-5 will be seen in the U.S. and Europe in exactly the same light as the My Lai massacre, the napalming of Vietnam, and all the worst imperial atrocities we are all familiar with (of course, outside the U.S. and Europe, they’re already seen this way)

U.S. presidents prove how tough and decisive they are by killing vast numbers of innocent people on the far side of the world.

But it does seem crystal clear that Israel’s bombing of Gaza, and Biden and Trump’s support for that bombing, is a crime completely in line with the worst moments of U.S. empire, and completely consistent with the rest of that bloody history.

I don’t necessarily think that being a historian of violence and imperialism gives me any special expertise or insight into violence and crimes which happen in 2025.

It’s worth noting that the Washington Post published a very similar story two months ago, and the bombing has not stopped since, so of course, 18,500 will be a vast underestimate of the true total.

Thanks Adam, and same to you!!

If I’m lucky, the dissertation will be a book at some point. After I’ve left it alone for a long time and gained the strength to cut it ruthlessly and hammer it into better shape. Drop your pre-orders now, or wait for my next very long thread to drop in c. ten years’ time….

…but it is very interesting that European Christians were so focused on these emotional transformations. What strange predicaments did Africans find themselves in as a result?

My assumption is that these transformations did not actually happen - I have no reason to believe that slaveholders succeeded in “remoulding” enslaved people on a religious or an emotional level, and I think most people would be rightly sceptical of that idea -…

Jesuit writers in particular speculated about how they could transform the emotions of enslaved people, to make those people better Christians.

A lot of the religious rituals I looked at had an interesting emotional dimension. Christian thought in the seventeenth century was - to generalise wildly - intensely emotional, so the Christian texts I read for the dissertation discussed emotion a great deal.

How did this religious dimension of trafficking work? How did Europeans try to transform Africans through religious rituals, and how did Africans navigate the resulting predicaments?

Very few happened in English colonies (a striking difference between different regimes).

I was especially interested in the times when religion shaped slaveholding in the various places I studied. Captives were routinely baptised as they were trafficked. Famous mass baptisms happened in Luanda, others happened in Cartagena.

What did Antonio’s journey through the Caribbean look like? What were the different colonies he passed through? How did those colonies treat newly-arrived captives, and how did newly-arrived captives try to navigate each new experience, ordeal after ordeal, predicament after predicament?

But before Antonio got to Providence, he had been enslaved in the Spanish colonial city of Cartagena de Indias. And before that, he had probably been trafficked into the Atlantic through the Portuguese colonial city of Luanda, in the colony of Angola.