When:
Monday, January 12, 2026
12:30 PM - 1:45 PM CT
Where: Harris Hall, Room 108 (Leopold Room), 1881 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208 map it
Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Public - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students
Contact:
Annerys Cano
annerys.cano@northwestern.edu
Group: Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs
Category: Global & Civic Engagement
Hosted by the Department of History, Chabraja Center for Historical Studies, and Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs.
The Bonds of Freedom (Yale University Press, 2025) tells the forgotten story of people seized from slave ships by maritime patrols, “liberated,” then forced into bonded labor between 1807 and 1880. Using extensive archival research from Sierra Leone, South Africa, Brazil, Cuba, the United Kingdom, and the United States, historian Jake Subryan Richards, Assistant Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science, uncovers the contrasting ideas and practices of authoritarianism and freedom that empires and liberated Africans developed during the protracted end of the illegal slave trade.
Lunch begins at 12:00 p.m.