Nicholas Sy, assistant professor at the Department of History, University of the Philippines Diliman and External PhD candidate, Radboud University.
Nicholas C. Sy and Eva Maria Lehner broke off from the group who went from Amsterdam to Bonn and, ironically, went from Bonn to Spain for a Congress on the History of the Family. The event was attended by hundreds of historians from primarily Hispanophone but also Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone worlds. Nicholas and Eva presented in a two-part panel “Slave family formation in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe” organized by prof. Dr. Jan Kok from Radboud University Nijmegen.
Far from quixotic, these back to back panels in La Mancha presented empirical results from large early modern databases, leading to comparative discussions over matters like levels of illegitimacy, child abandonment, and child mortality among the enslaved in Brazil, the Caribbean, the Spanish peninsula, the South African coast and the rest of the Indian Ocean World. Why, for example, were levels of illegitimacy so much higher in the Iberian peninsula and the Iberian Americas than in Iberian Asia? The dynamic discussion was done in both Spanish and English. The congress’s use of Microsoft PowerPoint’s translated subtitling tool was intermittently unsuccessful (misquoting one presenter as being a specialist in Birds and in the World of Warcraft), but no supplementary charades were necessary as some participants translated for others.
What was wonderful about this conference was that Nicholas, for example, was able to watch a panel in Portuguese about the record linkage of large Brazilian databases, which reminded him a lot about the IISG’s own efforts to create and link the same for the Indian Ocean World. After several days in a row of paella and too much ham, Nicholas and Eva left the surprising cold of Spain to return to the warmth of Western Germany.