This series provides a venue for scholarly work—research monographs and edited volumes—that advances our understanding of the history of slavery and post-slavery in any period and any geographical region. It fills an important gap in academic publishing and builds upon two relatively recent developments…

The Journal of Global Slavery (JGS) aims to advance and promote a greater understanding of slavery and post-slavery from comparative, transregional, and/or global perspectives. It especially underscores the global and globalizing nature of slavery in world history.

These four volumes offer students and researchers a rich collection of published works on the history of slavery works by some of the most preeminent scholars in the field.

In Slaving Zones: Cultural Identities, Ideologies, and Institutions in the Evolution of Global Slavery, fourteen authors—including both world-leading and emerging historians of slavery—engage with the ‘Slaving Zones’ theory.

The Leiden Slavery Studies Association (LSSA) is dedicated to promoting a greater understanding of slavery and post-slavery in any period and any geographical region.

The Leiden Slavery Studies Association (LSSA) is dedicated to promoting a greater understanding of slavery and post-slavery in any period and any geographical region.

This book sheds new light on domestic forced migration by examining the experiences of American-born slave migrants from a comparative perspective.

During the Slavery Memorial Year, from 1 July 2023 to 1 July 2024, the Kingdom of the Netherlands reflected on its colonial and slavery history.

The colonial and slavery past is an important theme in education and research at Leiden University. Particular attention is also paid to structural abuses that arose from this history and that often still persist in the present day.

How did slaves in the eighteenth century manage to empower themselves and their kin, and why did this become all the more difficult in the nineteenth century?

The Leiden Slavery Studies Association cooperates with the following partners:

An international congress, lectures and a new book series and magazine. It’s a hot topic at the moment that attracts broad public interest. Researchers, from historians to legal experts, are bringing together their expertise in the Leiden Slavery Studies Association.

Forgotten Lineages explores the paths through which generations of formally enslaved and their descendants gradually forgot their past of enslavement under Dutch and British imperial rule and became local subjects in Sri Lanka and South Africa. It explores why and how forgetting rather than memory became…

What did it mean to be enslaved in in the Indian Ocean world in the 18th and 19th centuries? Over the last decades, historians have mined French, British, Portuguese and Dutch records for quantitative data on the European slave trade. This project focuses on the experience of being a slave and seeks…

How does global change across time and space lead to convergence and loss of variation or increasing diversity and conflict?

The Global Abolitionisms Network, established in 2015, is an international network of scholars working on antislavery activism and abolitionism. It is affiliated to the Leiden Slavery Studies Association.

Unlike most city histories, this book focuses exclusively on the city’s connections with colonialism and slavery.

Being a Slave brings together scholars and writers who try to come to terms with the histories and legacies of European slavery in the Indian Ocean.

The key subject of the research programme Cities, Migration and Global Interdependence 1500-now (CMGI) is Inequality (at local, national and global levels). We study this from an intersectional perspective: gender, class, ethnicity or race, religion, sexuality, age, ability/disability, citizenship and…

The Colonial and Global History Research Programme of the Leiden University Institute for History combines a deep curiosity of transcultural processes such as imperialism, (de)colonization, and globalization with critical historical research on regional societies in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

Colonial and Global History combines a deep curiosity of transcultural processes such as imperialism, (de)colonization, and globalization with critical historical research on regional societies in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

The key subject of the research programme Cities, Migration and Global Interdependence 1500 - Now (CMGI) is Inequality (at local, national and global levels).

In this article, Lydie Cabane, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, discusses the emergence and diffusion of ‘global health’ as a concept. In addition to bringing a fresh perspective on the origins of global health, the paper contributes to the globalization debates by…

The research group Diplomacy and Global Affairs focuses on international diplomacy, international organisation, global, transnational, multi-level and comparative governance. Among key research topics are the European Union and the United Nations, EU current enlargement policy, rule of law in the EU,…

On 1 July – Keti Koti, in the year ahead, our university community will be able to reflect extensively on the history of slavery by engaging in research, education and many other activities.

The excuses for the slavery past? It would have been better if the cabinet had taken some more time on that, thinks university lecturer and Atlantic slavery expert Karwan Fatah-Black. 'Too bad they didn’t wait for the results of the study.'

How did colonial law work to turn people into property? This project argues that colonial ideas about households and domestic authority were critical to legal processes of enslavement in the early modern Dutch empire. Using colonial court records from Dutch Brazil, Suriname, and the Moluccas, the project…

Discover the effects of clothing value and lifespan on buyer-user-producer relationships through collaborative research with Localising Global Garment Biographies.

Building on the recent initiative to truly globalize the field of international relations, this book provides an innovative interrogation of regionalism.

What do the cloth trade and slavery have to do with each other? Quite a lot, as it turns out, as by history student Sjoerd Ramackers demonstrated in his bachelor’s thesis. He reveals that cloth merchant Daniel van Eijs was closely associated with four plantations in Berbice, a former Dutch colony on…

The key subject of Cities, Migration and Global Interdependence is Inequality at local, national and global levels.

This article explores levels and patterns of legitimacy beliefs with respect to multistakeholder global governance at ICANN. From a large and systematic evidence base, Jongen & Scholte have found that ICANN has strong legitimacy underpinnings among its staff and board, as well as quite uniformly moderate-to-high…

In the research master Cities, Migration and Global Interdependence at Leiden University you will study processes of migration, urbanisation, economic development and global interaction over time.

What is the significance of the history of slavery for our present-day society? A special exhibition in the inner courtyard of the Academy Building features eleven insightful portraits of students and staff, and their answer to this question. The aim of the exhibition’s initiators is to make the subject…

Many traces of the city's slavery history can be found in Leiden but the public isn't always aware of them. The initiators of 'Mapping Slavery in Leiden' want to change this with guided tours and street markers. Representatives of the University and other Leiden institutions will be giving the first…

LUC's Liberal Arts and Sciences programme is centered around these four Global Challenges: Peace & Justice, Sustainability, Diversity, and Prosperity.

How do we account for historical power dynamics when writing new histories of slavery and emancipation? What critical methods can we employ when studying preserved archives and collections? A new book series aims to address these questions. The initiators Karwan Fatah-Black and Ilse Josepha Lazaroms…

References to nature and the environment in the Caribbean literary and the contemporary age of globalization.

The minor Global Affairs is built on two pillars of International Relations: International Security and International Political Economy. This minor aims to provide students with the tools and knowledge to understand the most important global trends and challenges.

Fostering multi-polar perspectives that engage more connected, nuanced and pluralistic understandings of the world. Global Interactions encourages and supports research that provides significant new insights on these global processes across time and space.

This research project is supported by an NWO Aspasia grant, DeepDish TV, crowd-sourced funding, and the Democracy and Media Foundation.

Global Challenges is the research programme of the Leiden Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology.

Political Scientist Gisela Hirschmann (Leiden University) asks how international organisations can be compelled to comply with respect human rights. She finds that this is done through ‘pluralist accountability’: external third parties such as courts, NGOs, or regional organisations holding international…

The Mapping Slavery project will place markers that tell the story of Leiden’s slavery past. Why is this important and what does it mean for today’s society? Before the markers are placed, a panel came together on 24 March to discuss the slavery past of not only the city but the University too.

In this journal article, Dr. Joris Larik and Dr. Richard Ponzio put forward a broad-based pandemic recovery agenda that goes hand in hand with institutional reforms at the global level.

Considering the ways in which the ‘global turn’ is changing the theory and practice of historical disciplines, Explorations in History and Globalization engages with the concept and methodology of globalization, challenging traditional divisions of space and time to offer a range of perspectives on…

GLOBALINT is a pioneering study of intelligence in the Global South. It asks ‘how do (un)democratic shifts in political governance impact intelligence services in contexts of violent conflict?

Hegemony and World Order explores a key question for our tumultuous times of multiple global crises.