The semantics of slavery and social relations in England during the long seventeenthcentury

As part of the Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lectures, Phil Withington from the University of Sheffield, UK, gave a lecture that uses a range of printed materials and analytical methods to address the vocabulary of slavery in England during the long seventeenth century and traces what was an important process of vernacularisation. Moreover, it aims at identifying the kinds of socio-economic, gendered relations and tensions, that the language of slavery was used to characterise, as well as the semantic stability (or not) of the vocabulary over time. In so doing, the lecture also begins to assess the impact of colonial developments on vernacular discussions of the social order: not least the institutionalisation of indentured service and racist chattel slavery in the Caribbean and American seaboard. Phil Withington is Professor of History at the University of Sheffield. An expert in early modern Britain and the wider world, he has published extensively on urbanisation and urban culture, the social history of language, and the history of intoxicants. He is currently a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow working on two book projects: one about Europe's first psychoactive revolution, the other on the social history of the English renaissance. It is through both of these projects that he has developed an interest in the history of slavery in early modern England.