Karwan Fatah-Black (b. 1981) studied history at the University of Amsterdam and received his doctorate from the University of Leiden in 2013. He specialised in the early-modern history of Suriname and the slave trade. In 2016 the KNAW granted him the prestigious Young Scientists Award for Historical Science for his research on Dutch trans-atlantic trade, in particular the slave trade.
(Ambo Anthos, 2018, 223 pages)
In Paths through Slavery, Karwan Fatah-Black definitively reorients our understanding of slavery and emancipation in Suriname by drawing our attention to the edges of the bustling port city of Paramaribo during the 18th and 19th centuries.
(Ambo Anthos, 2021, 192 pages)
In this incisive work, historian Karwan Fatah-Black contributes important historical context to the debate surrounding the cultural legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. He refutes what he calls the ‘Grand Narrative’ that in the history of Christian civilisation, slavery was a short-lived aberration picked up from the Islamic world, until its definitive abolition by humanist Europeans, which many Western Europeans still cling to.
