In these times, a shifting world is upon us—one that demands a close examination of equality, freedom, and humanity. At the center of that critical examination are issues of race, colonialism, and the legacies of slavery. As communities demand an end to racial inequality, the urgency to grapple with the pains and realities of the past comes front and center.

While the history of slavery has been robustly centered in the United States, in reality, these global enterprises flourished the world over, creating human subjects and chattel of men, women, and children, in North America, South America, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, Australasia and other lands. Portuguese ships alone carried millions of Africans into slavery over a period of four centuries from the mid-15th century.

Even after slavery’s formal abolition, colonization became a rebranded form of human subjugation and subordination, seen vividly through the lenses of Europe’s imperial reaches into Asia and Africa, a precursor for modern forms of slavery and the predatory ways in which modern societies exploit the non-human environment. The violence and exploitation that resulted remains a point of social, legal, cultural and even ecological trauma today.