Lunch and Learn: Slavery’s Hinterlands

The Connecticut Museum hosts this Lunch and Learn session where you’ll learn about the role of slavery in colonial New England. At the end of the seventeenth century, ships and sugar streamed between the Caribbean and New England. Though it would be a mistake to suggest that New England was a slave society on par with South Carolina, Barbados, or Virginia, New England’s economy grew larger and more powerful, not because of slavery’s distance or marginality, but because of its centrality. This Atlantic slave economy made an imprint across the entire region. Rural New Englanders provided the draft animals and the foodstuffs that Caribbean plantations relied on. They sought out and consumed the rum and sugar those plantations produced. *This is a virtual event.