Speaker Series: Why Canada Matters - guest speaker Sarah Chute, University of Toronto

Locating Canadian Slavery - A Comparative and Transnational Approach

Why Canada Matters Speakers Series

This webinar is a part of Canadian-American Studies' Black History Month programming

Co-sponsored by the Center for Canadian-American Studies, the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the department of History, and in partnership with the WWU Alumni Association

Sarah Chute is a PhD student studying slavery and freedom in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North America. Her research interests are in the history of enslavement in Canada, transnational free and forced migration, trade, and how slavery connected the Maritime colonies to other parts of the Atlantic world, including the British Caribbean.

The history of slavery in Canada can only be understood in a comparative and transnational context. Proximity to the United States and the wider Atlantic world shaped enslaved people’s experiences in bondage in the Maritime colonies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. Their stories help us grasp the vast, violent, and insidious power of slavery in North America and give nuance to the opportunities they seized and obstacles they faced as a result of their enslavement in what would later become part of Canada.