An international research team, led by a Lancaster University History Professor, is to receive a €9,999,324 million grant to identify and examine how investors in the trans-Atlantic traffic in enslaved African people, based inside and outside Europe, shaped the economies, politics, and cultures of Europe.

Lancaster University will receive a €2,958,902 share of the European Research Council (ERC) Synergy Grant, it was announced today (November 6).

The international project, The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Development of Europe (TASTADE), is led by historian Professor William Pettigrew, from Lancaster University’s School of Global Affairs.

The transatlantic traffic in enslaved African people was the largest, forced, transoceanic migration in human history.

It destroyed the lives of around twelve and a half million enslaved African men, women, and children, across the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and the lives of millions more of their descendants.

“TASTADE, a global scientific collaboration, will identify and study the tens of thousands of people who financed the transatlantic traffic in enslaved African people to appreciate their significance for European development – not just financially, but culturally, and politically,” said Professor Pettigrew.

“Up to now, the study of the significance of the traffic has been hampered by national research silos and fixated on determining the traffic’s profitability.

“This project synergises the expertise of leading scholars based in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, and Brazil into a pan-European and circum-Atlantic perspective on the traffic’s role in shaping commercial, financial, political, and cultural change.

“This large grant will form a 36-person research team to deliver not just a new empirical foundation for scientific and public debates on the impact of the trafficking of enslaved Africans on Europe, but also a transformed understanding of the multidimensional role the traffickers of these people played in European development.”

The team, which includes Free University Amsterdam, University of Côte d'Azur, France, Federal Fluminense, Brazil and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences will deliver the ground-breaking assessment of the national and trans-national networks that facilitated this trade and by linking these networks to key aspects of European development.

TASTADE is one of only 66 research teams, selected from 712 proposals, bringing together 239 scientists, to receive a share of €684 million in ERC Synergy Grants to tackle some of the most challenging scientific questions across a broad range of fields.

The selected projects will be carried out at universities and research centres in 26 countries across Europe and beyond.

The ERC Synergy Grants foster collaboration between outstanding researchers, enabling them to combine their expertise, knowledge and resources to push the boundaries of scientific discovery. This funding is part of the EU’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme.

President of the European Research Council, Professor Maria Leptin, said: ‘Collaboration is at the heart of the ERC Synergy Grants. In our latest round, teams of researchers will join forces to address the most complex scientific problems together - this time, they are more international than ever. The competition was fierce, with many outstanding proposals left unfunded.”

The ERC, set up by the European Union in 2007, is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research.

The Lancaster share of the grant will create seven new jobs: four PhD studentships, two postdoctoral research fellowships, and a project manager

Professor Pettigrew is an expert historian on Britain's contribution to the transatlantic traffic in enslaved African people with expertise both in the traffic managed by joint stock companies and the leaders of the 'free trade' in enslaved Africans

In 2020 he won a £1million UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council grant to examine the significance of the transatlantic traffic in enslaved African people in Britain by examining, for the first time, the entire population of around 11,000 investors. The project, due to be published next year, will provide new insights on the extensive networks of individuals that tied Britain’s economy and society to Atlantic slavery. TASTADE builds and expands on this research.