HISTORY OF
GLOBALISATION
Prof. Koenraad Bogaert
2025-2026
Rahul Siddhartan Rajakumar
,Table of Contents
Class 2 – A World Changing Machine ...................................................................... 2
Class 3 – How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (& the World) ................................... 5
Class 4 – The World According to Race ................................................................... 9
Class 5 – Mobility Injustice – Race and Tourism .................................................... 14
Class 6 – Resistance and Revolution in the Colony ............................................... 18
Class 7 – Black Jacobins and the Black Atlantic .................................................... 23
Class 8 – Concerning Violence ............................................................................. 28
Class 9 – Third Worldism and Its Defeat................................................................ 35
Class 10 – Colonialism Today - Palestine .............................................................. 42
Class 11 – Towards a New World? ......................................................................... 47
,Class 2 – A World Changing Machine
Reading: Marcus Rediker (2007) The Slave Ship. A human history
1. Main Idea
• Slave ships are one of the most central instruments through which the modern global
capitalist world was created
• Slave ship as the “World-Changing Machine”
o Treated as a machine that connected Europe, Africa and the Americas
▪ Through forced movement, violence, trade, racialisation, plantation
labour, capital accumulation
o Slave ship as a factory, machine, prison and system of terror
▪ Plantation complex, triangular trade (Europe-America-Africa),
production of race, primitive accumulation
• Modern world was created through conquest, enslavement, forced transportation, racial
terror and transformation of man into commodity
o World making project was rooted in European colonisation, through connections
between Europe, Africa, Caribbean and the Americas
2. Rediker’s Introduction
• The story of a woman
o To understand the slave ship from the perspective of the people who
experienced it
o Away from treating slave ships as just numbers and economics
▪ Stats alone cannot communicate the lived reality of terror, resistance
and death
• Violence of abstraction
o Balance sheets, graphs and tables make violence appear distant and technical
o “price” hides the social relations behind commodity
▪ Commodity is not just sugar or rice
▪ The hidden reality is the coercive transformation of African people into
enslaved labour
• The Slave Trade
o A massive structural system involving empire, capital, ships, etc.
o Experienced by actual human beings through fear, hunger, confinement,
resistance and death
3. The 4 Human Dramas
• Captain and Crew
o Captain as a violent commander
▪ Controlled sailors and enslaved Africans
o Sailors were poor, badly fed, exposed to disease and subjugated to brutal
discipline
▪ Exploited workers but also agents of violence against the enslaved
o Slave ship was not a simple binary of white freedom and black enslavement
▪ Contained patterns of hierarchy, coercion, class domination and racial
power all at once
, • Soldiers and the enslaved
o Sailors carried out the captain’s orders
▪ Forced captains below deck, feed, whipped and punished them
▪ Helped transformed captives into commodities for the international
labour market
o Rediker’s ‘factory’ argument
▪ Slave ship was not just a mode of transport
▪ It helped produce enslaved people as marketable labour power
• Through violence, confinement, discipline and bodily control
• Between the enslaved themselves
o People of different ethnicities, classes, languages and genders were all forced
together below deck
o But they were not passive victims
▪ They exchanged information, created new forms of communication, built
new bonds (shipmates)
▪ Ship was a space of destruction but also space of emergence of new
forms of identity, kinship and resistance
• Between the slave ship and the abolitionist public opinion
o Abolitionists wanted to show Britain and America the hidden violence of the
slave ship
▪ The Brookes slave ship image
▪ It showed how bodies were packed into the vessel and helped turn the
ship into evidence against slave trade
o The enslaved themselves were the first abolitionists
4. Chapter 1 – Rediker
• Terror on the slave ship was not irrational cruelty alone
o It was economic calculation where violence served the market
o Terror was part of the business model
o The captain preserves valuable human property while using punishment to
discipline everyone else
▪ Captain Tomba who unsuccessfully revolted was kept alive to be sold
profitably, while less valuable captives were killed to show an example
• How are humans capable in engaging in such monstrosities?
o They had moral language, religious justifications, racial ideas, economic
interests and imperial assumptions that allowed reinterpretation of violence as
business, rescue, civilisation or necessity
o William Snelgrave
▪ Imagined himself as a Christian, civilised, human and saviour while
participating in the destruction of African families and plantation slavery
• Slave ship was not exclusive to polite society
o It was connected to finance, politics, empire and respectability
▪ Politicians, bankers and patriots were materially tied to slavery
o Humphrey Morice
▪ London’s leading slave trader in early 18th century
▪ Deeply connected to global trade, finance, parliament and the Bank of
England
o Henry Laurens
▪ Transformed profits from the slave trade into plantations, land, political
office and status
GLOBALISATION
Prof. Koenraad Bogaert
2025-2026
Rahul Siddhartan Rajakumar
,Table of Contents
Class 2 – A World Changing Machine ...................................................................... 2
Class 3 – How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (& the World) ................................... 5
Class 4 – The World According to Race ................................................................... 9
Class 5 – Mobility Injustice – Race and Tourism .................................................... 14
Class 6 – Resistance and Revolution in the Colony ............................................... 18
Class 7 – Black Jacobins and the Black Atlantic .................................................... 23
Class 8 – Concerning Violence ............................................................................. 28
Class 9 – Third Worldism and Its Defeat................................................................ 35
Class 10 – Colonialism Today - Palestine .............................................................. 42
Class 11 – Towards a New World? ......................................................................... 47
,Class 2 – A World Changing Machine
Reading: Marcus Rediker (2007) The Slave Ship. A human history
1. Main Idea
• Slave ships are one of the most central instruments through which the modern global
capitalist world was created
• Slave ship as the “World-Changing Machine”
o Treated as a machine that connected Europe, Africa and the Americas
▪ Through forced movement, violence, trade, racialisation, plantation
labour, capital accumulation
o Slave ship as a factory, machine, prison and system of terror
▪ Plantation complex, triangular trade (Europe-America-Africa),
production of race, primitive accumulation
• Modern world was created through conquest, enslavement, forced transportation, racial
terror and transformation of man into commodity
o World making project was rooted in European colonisation, through connections
between Europe, Africa, Caribbean and the Americas
2. Rediker’s Introduction
• The story of a woman
o To understand the slave ship from the perspective of the people who
experienced it
o Away from treating slave ships as just numbers and economics
▪ Stats alone cannot communicate the lived reality of terror, resistance
and death
• Violence of abstraction
o Balance sheets, graphs and tables make violence appear distant and technical
o “price” hides the social relations behind commodity
▪ Commodity is not just sugar or rice
▪ The hidden reality is the coercive transformation of African people into
enslaved labour
• The Slave Trade
o A massive structural system involving empire, capital, ships, etc.
o Experienced by actual human beings through fear, hunger, confinement,
resistance and death
3. The 4 Human Dramas
• Captain and Crew
o Captain as a violent commander
▪ Controlled sailors and enslaved Africans
o Sailors were poor, badly fed, exposed to disease and subjugated to brutal
discipline
▪ Exploited workers but also agents of violence against the enslaved
o Slave ship was not a simple binary of white freedom and black enslavement
▪ Contained patterns of hierarchy, coercion, class domination and racial
power all at once
, • Soldiers and the enslaved
o Sailors carried out the captain’s orders
▪ Forced captains below deck, feed, whipped and punished them
▪ Helped transformed captives into commodities for the international
labour market
o Rediker’s ‘factory’ argument
▪ Slave ship was not just a mode of transport
▪ It helped produce enslaved people as marketable labour power
• Through violence, confinement, discipline and bodily control
• Between the enslaved themselves
o People of different ethnicities, classes, languages and genders were all forced
together below deck
o But they were not passive victims
▪ They exchanged information, created new forms of communication, built
new bonds (shipmates)
▪ Ship was a space of destruction but also space of emergence of new
forms of identity, kinship and resistance
• Between the slave ship and the abolitionist public opinion
o Abolitionists wanted to show Britain and America the hidden violence of the
slave ship
▪ The Brookes slave ship image
▪ It showed how bodies were packed into the vessel and helped turn the
ship into evidence against slave trade
o The enslaved themselves were the first abolitionists
4. Chapter 1 – Rediker
• Terror on the slave ship was not irrational cruelty alone
o It was economic calculation where violence served the market
o Terror was part of the business model
o The captain preserves valuable human property while using punishment to
discipline everyone else
▪ Captain Tomba who unsuccessfully revolted was kept alive to be sold
profitably, while less valuable captives were killed to show an example
• How are humans capable in engaging in such monstrosities?
o They had moral language, religious justifications, racial ideas, economic
interests and imperial assumptions that allowed reinterpretation of violence as
business, rescue, civilisation or necessity
o William Snelgrave
▪ Imagined himself as a Christian, civilised, human and saviour while
participating in the destruction of African families and plantation slavery
• Slave ship was not exclusive to polite society
o It was connected to finance, politics, empire and respectability
▪ Politicians, bankers and patriots were materially tied to slavery
o Humphrey Morice
▪ London’s leading slave trader in early 18th century
▪ Deeply connected to global trade, finance, parliament and the Bank of
England
o Henry Laurens
▪ Transformed profits from the slave trade into plantations, land, political
office and status
