Enfilade

From Bloomsbury:

Matthew Jones, Curating Transatlantic Slavery: Contesting Histories and Practices in the Museum (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2026), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-1350444119, £85 / $115.

Following the watershed Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, and the wider public awareness of the legacies of the British Empire that has followed, how have museums developed anti-racist and decolonial practices that engage more directly with slavery’s ongoing legacies?

Curating Transatlantic Slavery presents a timely intervention into this important work, examining the curating and decision-making processes that underpin the memorialization and display of Transatlantic Slave Trade histories. Questioning how contemporary curatorial practice has been shaped by wider processes of race and racialization, and how it can engage further with these issues, Matthew Jones argues that museums must be self-reflective: scrutinizing the ways in which they racialize those they collaborate with, be that artists or communities, and how their own histories are linked with historical structures of racialization.

Each chapter focuses on a distinctive aspect of contemporary museum practice in relation to colonial history and race, covering the varying approaches of museums in the UK and Europe. Museums discussed include the Tropenmuseum in the Netherlands, Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium, and in the UK: the Victoria & Albert Museum, British Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Bristol Museums, and National Maritime Museum. Driven by comparative analysis, the chapters are grouped under the following themes, representing the core issues related to engaging with the Transatlantic Slave Trade and colonial histories on a curatorial basis: institutional history and memory; collaborative curatorial practice with communities, artists and academics; affect and the communication of trauma; and finally the impact of contemporary anti-racist movements on the displaying of slavery and anti-slavery resistance. In deconstructing these processes and histories in modern museum practice, Curating Transatlantic Slavery challenges the role of museums across the world, in the formation of racial representations and provides alternative paths towards instituting anti-racist practices.

Matthew Jones is an early career researcher with a PhD from the University Sussex. He is the co-founder of the Post-Colonial Heritage Research Group and works in museums in visitor engagement.

c o n t e n t s

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Challenging History in the Contact Zone

1 | Institutional Memory and Slavery
Victoria and Albert Museum: Art, Design and Slavery
The British Museum: Racial Capitalism and the Universal Museum

2 | National Museums and Slavery
The National Portrait Gallery: Placing the Caribbean in white British History
Memory, Geography and Race in the Portrait Gallery
AfricaMuseum: Civilising Colonialism

3 | Collaborative Curating and Race
The National Maritime Museum: Questioning Practice
Bristol Museums: Frameworks of Collaboration
Representation, Racialisation, and Collaboration

4 | Challenging Racecraft
London Museum Docklands and the Economics of Whiteness
Tropenmuseum: Whiteness, Nation, and Neutrality
Subverting Racecraft

5 | Bearing Witness: Emotion and Trauma in the International Slavery Museum
The ISM and Memorialisation in 2007
The ISM Since 2007: History and Social Justice
The ISM and Affective Autonomy within Wider Museum Practice

6 | Whiteness, Abolitionism and Affect
The Wilberforce House Museum
The Legacies of Transatlantic Slavery at the Wilberforce House Museum
Whiteness and Affect

7 | Collecting Anti-Racism
Protests and Rapid Response Collecting
The Politics of Articulating Black Lives Matter
All Voices Will Be Heard: the Consultative Exhibition
The Permanent Exhibition: Who Narrates Protest?

Conclusion: A Way Forward?

Index

With the first edition having appeared in 2010, the second edition was released earlier this year:

David Eltis, David Richardson, and Philip Misevich, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, second edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2026), 392 pages, ISBN: 978-0300278552, $65. Foreword by Toyin Falola and David Brion Davis, afterword David Blight. The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History.

A monumental cartographic history of the African slave trade, updated and expanded in a new edition.

In the first edition of Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, two leading historians explored details of the 350-year history of African slave traffic to the New World. They showed, with nearly 200 original maps, where the captives came from, how long the journeys lasted, how many died on the voyages, and what the ports and destinations were. They also presented details about the trade itself, including the economics. In this groundbreaking revised edition, 25 new maps locate the major language groups involved in the traffic and show the movement of Africans from the interior of the continent to the Americas, as well as from one part of the Americas to another. Accompanying the maps, as in the first edition, are revealing illustrations and contemporary literary selections, including poems, letters, and diary entries. With up-to-date information drawn from the database Slave Voyages (www.slavevoyages.org), with its records of more than 36,000 voyages, the atlas provides the fullest possible picture of the extent and inhumanity of one of the largest forced migrations in history.

David Eltis is Robert W. Woodruff Professor Emeritus of History, Emory University. His prizewinning books include The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas.
David Richardson (1946–2023) was the director of the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation and professor of economic history, University of Hull, England. His final book was Principles and Agents: The British Slave Trade and Its Abolition.
Philip Misevich is associate professor of history at St. John’s University. He is the author of Abolition and the Transformation of Atlantic Commerce in Southern Sierra Leone, 1790s to 1860s.