“Treasure Islands: Charles I, the English Empire, War, Death, and a Map”

A colloq with Holly Brewer (University of Maryland) and Elizabeth Hines (Ax:son Johnson Institute for Statecraft and Diplomacy Postdoctoral Fellow, Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University)Please note that all colloquia papers are pre-circulated. Please register via the link below to receive a copy.

In the early seventeenth century, different Protestant imperial actors sought to steal Spanish treasure and gain control over Spanish possessions in the West Indies. This paper argues that a variety of imperial projects in the seventeenth century, previously thought unconnected, followed one specific set of instructions, obtained by Prince Charles and the Duke of Buckingham in Spain in 1623.

Elizabeth Hines is an Ax:son Johnson Institute for Statecraft and Diplomacy Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University. From 2026 to 2028, she will be a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Manchester. Elizabeth received a PhD in history from the University of Chicago in 2024. Her research focuses on Anglo-Dutch relations and transimperial ventures in the early modern period. Her work has appeared in Diplomatica and The Court Historian, and it is forthcoming in the Journal of Early Modern History and Itinerario.

Holly Brewer is Burke Professor of American History and Associate Professor at the University of Maryland. She is a specialist in early American history and the early British empire as well as early modern debates about justice. Her first book traced the origin and impact of “democratical” ideas across  the empire by examining debates about who can consent in theory and legal practice: By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority. is currently finishing a book that examines the origins of American slavery in larger political and ideological debates: it is tentatively entitled ” Slavery & Sovereignty in Early America and the British Empire,” for which she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014. She published part of it as “Slavery, Sovereignty and ‘Inheritable Blood’: Reconsidering John Locke and the Origins of American Slavery” in the American Historical Review (October 2017).

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