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Introduction
I'm a Historical Archaeologist, researching and teaching slavery in comparative perspective - I work on (and across) both the Roman and Early Modern periods. In 2023 I published a book called Materializing the Middle Passage (OUP), focusing on British slave shipping from 1680-1807.
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September 2004 - present
Publications
Publications (34)
An estimated 2.8 million Africans made a forced crossing of the Atlantic on British slave ships: a journey known as the ‘Middle Passage’. This book focuses on the ship itself: the largest artefact of the transatlantic slave trade, but one rarely studied by archaeologists, because so few examples of wrecked slaving vessels have been located. This bo...
This article discusses a wooden chest used by the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, to display samples of African natural resources and artefacts. It explores the role played by the chest during the 1788–1789 Privy Council enquiry into the slave trade, and suggests that the box (which is usually thought of as travelling showcase employed by Clarkson in...
Between c. 1720 and 1807 Britain dominated the transatlantic slave trade, yet throughout the same period material representations of the trade remained markedly few. A demand for Liverpool ceramics depicting slave ships did, however, develop in the later 18th century. These artefacts provide important insights into both the aspirations of those dir...
"Romanization," a concept first discussed by the British scholar Francis Haverfield in 1905, remains the dominant model for intercultural change in the Roman provinces. Building on recent critiques of Romanization, this paper suggests that Romanization-which is simply acculturation-has merits as a means of envisaging the processes by which provinci...
Here is the preprint of my new article on links to Transatlantic slavery in the Pitt Rivers Museum collection. The published article (with images) can be found in the Journal of Museum Ethhnograph 28 (March 2025) 105-132
This is the first chapter from my 2023 book Materializing the Middle Passage
Please note that the currency is in UK sterling and US dollars, and the discount is only valid on orders placed on global.oup.com.
M. GEORGE (ED.), ROMAN SLAVERY AND ROMAN MATERIAL CULTURE (Phoenix Supplementary Volume 52). Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Pp. viii + 240, illus. isbn 9781442644571. £52.99. - Volume 107 - Jane Webster
This article discusses a wooden chest used by the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, to display samples of African natural resources and artefacts. It explores the role played by the chest during the 1788–1789 Privy Council enquiry into the slave trade, and suggests that the box (which is usually thought of as travelling showcase employed by Clarkson in...
The authors introduce a new artifact-centered oral-history methodology and describe its use in interpreting finds from the 19th-century midden associated with a row of cottages at Ovenstone, Northumberland. The history of settlement and excavation at Ovenstone are described, and the evolution and development of the artifact-centered approach is exp...
This article reviews the ways in which two key abolitionist artefacts were displayed in British museums in 2007. The Wedgwood ‘kneeling slave’ cameo (1787) and the broadsheet Description of a Slave Ship (1789) are two of the most familiar icons of abolition, but presented museums with particular challenges in 2007. It is argued that the widely take...
Each of the four discussants of my paper has offered constructive comment on specific points of detail in the piece. I am grateful for their insights, and for their consensus that the time has come to break down the disciplinary restraints that inhibit interdisciplinary cooperation in the study of slavery (and much else). In terms of my central foc...
Modern and ancient historians have long been willing to engage in the comparative analysis of ancient and modern slave-owning societies, yet archaeologists of both the Greek and Roman worlds have been far less willing to do the same. To the extent that they study slavery at all, they do so almost entirely within Graeco-Roman spatial and temporal co...
This introduction explores the relationship between maritime archaeology and the historical archaeology of the African Diaspora,
and discusses the structure and content of this special issue of IJHA, which marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition
of the British slave trade in 2007.
This contribution collates information about wrecked slaving vessels discovered or sought by maritime archaeologists since
1972. To date, only a handful of firmly identified, active slave ships have been subject to excavation, but additional work
has been carried out on wrecks of former slaver ships and possible slavers. The impending 200th anniver...
This contribution places the Zong tragedy in the wider context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic slave trade, a global business venture which from 1750 to 1807 was dominated by British ships. Evidence for ‘jettison’ within the British slave trade is examined, and the uniqueness of this aspect of the Zong case is emphasised. Attention is given to t...
On a number of levels, peripheral status has been imposed on the Outer Hebrides (Scotland) since the Jacobite Rebellion in 1745. Drawing on a series of interviews with Hebridean families, this paper explores the changing meanings of ceramics imported into the islands from the early nineteenth century and displayed on wooden dressers. It is argued t...
Questioning existing paradigms regarding religious syncretism in the western provinces of the Roman Empire, this paper addresses the difficulty of reconciling comparative study with historical contingency. It is argued that discourse analysis, as developed in post‐colonial discourse theory, both facilitates comparative study of material culture in...
As recently remarked by Poulton and Scott,' archaeological perspectives on Celtic deity are largely derived from the Romano-Celtic period, with studies employing 'the evidence of epigraphy and iconography to reveal how particular Roman and Celtic gods were identified with each other'.2 This paper explores a specific form of postConquest epigraphy:...
This is the final publisher edited version of the paper which was originally presented to a symposium held at the University of Leicester in November 1994 and published as Webster, J. ‘Roman imperialism and the ‘post imperial age’ in Webster, J.; Cooper, N. (ed.) Roman Imperialism: Post-Colonial Perspectives, (© Individual authors, 1996) pp. 1-17....
This is the final publisher edited version of the paper which was originally presented to a symposium held at the University of Leicester in November 1994 and published as Webster, J. ‘Ethnographic barbarity: colonial discourse and ‘Celtic warrior societies’’ in Webster, J.; Cooper, N. (ed.) Roman Imperialism: Post-Colonial Perspectives, (© Individ...
