University Of Melbourne’s Trevor Burnard to Discuss the Transatlantic Slave Trade at WWU Feb. 15

Trevor Burnard, a professor of History and Head of University of Melbourne, Australia will host a public talk titled “Murder on the High Seas” at 4 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 15 in Communications Facility 115.

This event is free and open to the public.

“Murder on the High Seas: The Zong, Jamaican Commerce, and the American Revolution” will discuss the Zong, a ship in the transatlantic slave trade that is famous due to the murder of 132 African captives who were thrown overboard to collect insurance in 1781. Burnard will also discuss the new perspectives on why the event occurred in the way, place and time that it did.

Burnard is one of the leading scholars of slavery and empire in the early modern Atlantic world. He has published several books on the subject, his most recent titled “The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica.”  

For more information about Burnard’s public talk, contact Jared Hardesty, Western Washington University professor of History, at jared.hardesty@wwu.edu.