Human Trafficking in Early America Conference

James Fuller Queen. The Parting: “Buy us too”. Philadelphia, 1863. Chromolithograph.

On Thursday, April 23, the Library Company will host the keynote address for a conference titled “Human Trafficking in Early America,” co-sponsored with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Department of History at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the Caspersen School of Graduate Studies, Drew University.

The United Nations defines human trafficking as the act of “recruiting, transporting, transferring, harboring, or receiving a person through a use of force, coercion or other means, for the purpose of exploiting them.” In early America, human trafficking took many forms, engaging and displacing Native, African, and European populations in every decade and in every colony and state. Drawing upon a wave of new scholarship on Indian captivity, the Middle Passage, the domestic slave trade, child abduction, and sex trafficking, this conference offers a timely opportunity to examine the cultures and shadow economies created by and elaborated around forced migration in North America and the Atlantic world before 1865.

The conference will take place Thursday, April 23 – Saturday, April 25, with all sessions after the keynote at the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies. For a complete conference schedule and to register, visit the conference website.