Slave Voices and the Quest for Freedom in the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula

Slave Voices and the Quest for Freedom in the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula in the first half of the twentieth century by Professor Simon C Smith

We are delighted to host Professor Simon C Smith as part of the Wilberforce Institute's Public Lecture programme, in association with Hull Museums.

While the experience of slave owners can readily be found in archives, often coming into sharp focus, the enslaved remain occluded by lack of evidence. This is especially true of those caught up in the horrors of slavery and the plantation system in the Americas. Advertisements placed in eighteenth and nineteenth century newspapers offering rewards for the capture of runaway slaves are often the only sources that provide evidence of their individual existence. Consisting of just a few lines, these records are not merely fragmentary but, having been generated by the enslavers rather than the enslaved, are inherently problematic sources. By contrast, a unique and underutilised resource for shedding light on the interior lives of enslaved people does exist in the form of testimonies of slaves themselves who sought manumission certificates from the British authorities in the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula in the first half of the twentieth century. Startlingly underused, these sources offer a unique insight into how slaves experienced their lives in their own words which will be explored in this paper.

Simon C Smith is Professor of International International History in the School of Humanities at the University of Hull. He is an expert on British imperialism and decolonisation in the Middle East and the Mediterranean, as well as post-war Anglo-American relations. He has recently been awarded a Fellowship at the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation to conduct research on slavery and the slave trade in Arabia and the Persian Gulf which will result in a monograph for the Routledge Studies in the History of the Middle East series.

He has published nine books, including a trilogy of monographs on the modern history of the Persian Gulf . His OUP/British Academy study, Kuwait, 1950-1965: Britain, the al-Sabah and Oil, and his CUP book, British Imperialism, 1750-1970, have both appeared in translation.

In addition, he has published widely in leading academic journals, including Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Middle Eastern Studies, Contemporary British History, and Journal of Transatlantic Studies. He is also on the Editorial Board for a number of journals including Middle Eastern Studies.

He was part of the team which delivered the ground-breaking British Documents on the End of Empire Project. This prestigious series, for which he produced the volume on Malta, was supported by the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, and the AHRC. As regards Knowledge Exchange, his expertise has been drawn upon extensively by the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office for which he has delivered numerous talks and briefing papers on the modern history of the Gulf.

This year we are teaming up with Hull Museums to offer attendees at our public lectures the opportunity to visit Wilberforce House Museum next door before they join us for the lecture. As a result all our lectures will begin at 4.30pm, directly after the Museum closes, and all will take place at our home in Oriel Chambers, 27 High Street, Hull, HU1 1NE. We are very grateful for the financial support Hull Museums is providing to the Wilberforce Institute’s public lecture programme, and hope that some of you will take the opportunity to have a look round their exhibitions and displays in advance of the lectures. Please join us for refreshments from 4.15pm onwards, and if you can, stay afterwards for a glass of wine and a chance to talk with our speaker.

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Host or Publisher The Wilberforce Institute