History Professor Lou Roper participated in forum on Spanish slave trade and colonialism

History Professor Lou Roper participated in “An Atlantic Slave Trade Stretching from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean and Beyond: A Forum on Alejandro García-Montón, Genoese Entrepreneurship and the Asiento Slave Trade, 1650-1700″ based on a book that appeared in The Journal of Early American History in November.  

Roper’s contribution accompanies discussions of this important new book on the seventeenth-century trafficking of enslaved Africans into Spanish America from numerous experts in the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and European colonization of the Americas, as well as a response by García-Montón, the book’s author and professor of History at the University of Granada, Spain. 

Garcia-Montón’s book delves into how entrepreneurs, notably Domenico Grillo from the Republic of Genoa, contributed to transforming the scale of global trade during the second half of the 17th century. He and his associates benefited from a new Spanish business practice that tracked that followed in the Dutch Republic, France, and England where governments granted monopolistic licenses (asientos) to transport enslaved Africans into their American colonies. 

Roper’s appearance at the forum in connection with Garcia-Montón’s work is an extension of his renowned scholarship in the areas of Early Modern England and Colonial American history, research he has actively pursued since joining the New Paltz faculty in 1995.  

Roper is a SUNY Distinguished Professor, the highest academic honor in the SUNY system, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the New York Academy of History.   

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