“Sanctuary, Slavery, and Empire in Eighteenth Century Trinidad”

A colloq with Patrick Barker (OI Postdoctoral Fellow)
Please note that all colloquia papers are pre-circulated. Please register via the link below to receive a copy.

In 1680, the Spanish crown granted conditional sanctuary to fugitives who escaped foreign enslavers and made their way to Trinidad, then a marginal territory within Spain’s Caribbean empire. During the first half of the eighteenth century, the crown extended similar protections across its American territories, before suspending sanctuary practices in 1790. Situated against this backdrop, this paper traces maritime fugitivity to Spanish Trinidad amid the imperial warfare, ruptures, and reforms that transformed the southeastern Caribbean after the Seven Years’ War. Foregrounding the movements and claims of enslaved fugitives, it explores the degree to which Spanish imperial reformers and an increasingly powerful foreign planter class in Trinidad narrowed the possibilities of sanctuary well before its empire-wide suspension.

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Patrick Barker is an Omohundro Institute Postdoctoral fellow and an assistant professor of History at Miami Dade College–Hialeah Campus. He received a Ph.D. in History from Yale University in 2023. In 2024, his dissertation—“‘She Would Cut Canes No Longer: Slavery and Everyday Struggle in Trinidad, 1769-1834”—was awarded the Richmond Brown Dissertation Prize from the Southern Historical Association’s (SHA) Latin American and Caribbean Section, while in 2022, a paper drawn from the project received the Ralph J. Woodward Prize from the same organization.