This week’s readings were particularly interesting in how they offered alternative ways of thinking about the spatialization and temporality of the slave economy through a transnational and global perspective. Indeed, such perspective allowed the authors to highlight connexions between slave trade in the Atlantic, of which the study had often been limited to coastal areas and actors, and Central Europe as well as the importance of the hinterlands in this commerce. The readings offer a large overview of those varied connections which depended on economical, financial, political but also environmental contexts. For instance, Steffen and Weber’s text highlights how the specific political and economical context in Silesia, in which the feudal system , low salaries because of a surplus in workforce and intensification of labour in order for the poorer part of the population to be able to afford food, led to the global decrease of prices in the slave Atlantic market. Such phenomenon was due to the importance of the region as a linen exporter in the coastal areas involved in the slave trade and its competition with Indian producers in the textile market which exploited slaves.
Similarly, Atlantic experiences also influenced Central European contexts. In that sense, Struck’s article highlights the correlation between Western Europeans’ struggle to administrate and control overseas territories between the 1760s and 1770s, aggravated by the frequency of hurricanes in the Caribbean, and Prussia’s main focus on expanding its territories in Central Europe and developing the production and economy there rather than engaging in oversea projects. Such article allows us to rethink the spatialization and the integration of Central Europe in the global history of the period. Moreover, linking that article to Schui’s article on the Prussian Asiatic Trade Company project of the 1750s allows us to think about issues of temporality and entanglements. Indeed, Prussia’s failed attempt to join overseas commerce and become a competing force can also be seen as an event which later shaped Prussia’s focus on eastern territories and perhaps interacted with its perceptions of Western European countries own overseas enterprises.
Finally, Raphael-Hernandez and Wiegmink’s article highlights temporal entanglements going much further in time. Indeed, they explore how discourses developed in Germany on slave trade as well as its experiences in slave trade later influenced German colonial discourses and enterprises starting the end of the 19th century. They highlight how German involvement in the slave trade was already downplayed at the end of 19th century in order to guarantee a coherence in Germany’s colonial narrative, which emphasized its humanitarian role to justify colonialism. The authors argue that such erasing of German involvement in the slave trade can be linked back to Germany’s current “colonial amnesia”, thus highlighting how the reconceptualization of temporality and the acknowledgment of historical entanglements are necessary to understand current contexts but also further develop historiography on the Atlantic slave trade.