Framing Irish Complicity in Transatlantic Slavery – Wed 23rd June, 7pm
Framing Irish Complicity in Transatlantic Slavery by Brian Kelly
Wednesday 23rd June, 7pm
As part of the Mary Ann McCracken 250 series of events Reclaim the Enlightenment are hosting this talk by Dr Brian Kelly.
The powerful re-mergence of a global Black Lives Matter movement has helped propel a timely debate on how Ireland can best confront its own complicated entanglement in transatlantic slavery. A bustling port city and an emerging industrial powerhouse, nineteenth-century Belfast was home both to an influential mercantile elite eager to share in the spoils and to an outspoken abolitionist element. Against the backdrop of rising tensions in the United States, the city hosted a number of successful visits by prominent antislavery orators, including the escaped slaves Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garnet. This lecture will explore the ways in which empire, social inequality and colonialism intersected in early nineteenth-century Ireland to shape the country’s relationship to slavery in the Atlantic world, and to situate Belfast’s complex legacy within these wider influences.