John Harpham

In the 17th century, the maps of Africa current in England were beautifully colored and intricately detailed. They divided the continent into almost a dozen regions, each one dotted with cities and kingdoms. “Long before Europeans learned to think of Africa as a ‘dark continent’, they knew it as this vast and varied place,” explains John Harpham, a PhD candidate in the Department of Government. Harpham studies how this image of Africa could have coexisted and even enabled the early stages of the English trade in African slaves to the New World.

“In English culture during this period, to say why a certain person was a slave was to make no statement about what in essence or by nature they were,” Harpham explains. “Slavery was understood to depend on the actions or choices of persons, not their natures. It was assigned as a substitute for death for captives taken in war, criminals of certain kinds, and desperate peoples who had sold themselves in return for what they needed to survive.” This view of slavery, Harpham says, allowed the English to accommodate a widespread belief in the natural freedom of all mankind with the early phase of the African slave trade.

Historians have often assumed that the slave trade was driven by purely economic forces, but Harpham argues that ideas of slavery at the time also played a crucial part. “I want to understand why the English did not even think they needed to defend the practice, because it was so embedded in their ideas of fate, death, difference, labor, order, and even freedom.”

Harpham describes his research as trying to “trace unrecognizable ideas as they wind their way through minds that are to a great extent recognizable.” To us, slavery is an inconceivable wrong, but Harpham wants to show how people who were not so different from us came to accept it. “That is what fascinates me about this subject. It teaches us qualities of humility and vigilance. And it holds out some hope that if we can better understand how atrocity has happened in the past, we will be more able to recognize moral wrong in the present and in the future—that is, in ourselves.”