Australia's Black Past: the shared history of transatlantic slave trading and convict transportation to Africa and Australia

  • Christopher, Emma (Primary Chief Investigator (PCI))

Project: Research

Project Details

Project Description

This innovative project will explore the influences that the transatlantic slave trade, and its subsequent abolition, had on British convict transportation to West Africa and Australia. An understanding of the perceived similarities and differences in the two forms of coerced migration will shed new light on the nature of racial categorisation and racism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It will examine the ways in which changing attitudes towards blacks those of African descent were altered by the Australian settlement and relations with Aborigines. It will show how the prevailing linking of freedom with white skin was challenged by the penal settlement in New South Wales.
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date1/01/0631/12/09

Funding

  • Australian Research Council (ARC): A$51,980.00
  • Australian Research Council (ARC): A$223,020.00