Mar. 22, 2018—History Department Conference Room—255 Old Horticulture at 4:00 PM—Professor Alex Borucki, UC Irvine Department of History, “The Vernons of Newport in the River of Silver: Slave Trading and Circuits of Silver in the Atlantic-Oriented Global Markets of the Eighteenth Century”

This presentation examines the slave voyage conducted by the ship Ascension (1795-1797) connecting Rhode Island, Mozambique, and the Río de la Plata (The River of Silver, today’s Argentina and Uruguay), as a window into the eighteenth-century slave trade to Spanish South America. In this era, the slave trade became the key to accessing Spanish American consumers and silver for foreign traders. As a result, Spanish American silver entered English, Dutch, and Portuguese commercial circuits beneficial to metropolitan merchants and public revenues. The story of the Ascension’s captives goes beyond Anglo-American conceptions of the Middle Passage born out of the triangular trade, as the yearlong ordeal of these Africans involved Indian Ocean embarkation, Atlantic crossing to Montevideo, a journey on oxen-carts throughout the Pampas and on mule-trains across the Andes into Chile, and their final reshipment in the Pacific to Lima. Professor Borucki is the author of From Shipmates to Soldiers: Emerging Black Identities in the Rio de la Plata (University of New Mexico Press, 2015).