WMQ-EMSI Workshop, "Resisting Enslavement in Vast Early America"

RESISTING ENSLAVEMENT IN VAST EARLY AMERICA WMQ-EMSI WORKSHOP 2024 May 30 – June 1  HUNTINGTON LIBRARY, SAN MARINO, CALIFORNIA CONVENER: Jennifer L. Morgan From the Call for Proposals Scroll down to read the full program The histories of Black people in vast early America are grounded in refusal. Men,… Read More

"Commercializing blackness: color and race in New Spain (1784-1794)"

"Transforming Waste into Wealth: The Political Economy of Alcohol in the Leeward Islands, 1670-1737"

OI Colloquium with Lila O’Leary Chambers Alcohol played a crucial role in supporting the Leeward Islands’ transition from a “society with slaves” to an entrenched “slave society” across the early eighteenth century. Rather than acting solely as a signifier of planter excess, this chapter reveals that white settlers and enslaved and free African and African-descended peoples incorporated it in… Read More

“‘They brought them from the Palenque’: Captivity and Smuggling in Jamaica, ca. 1660”

OI Colloquium with Casey Schmitt Following the English invasion of Jamaica in 1655, Spanish forces maintained a toehold on the island over five years of guerilla warfare in large part because of the food and shelter they received from three different semi-autonomous Afro-Jamaican communities on the island. While historians discuss two of the three Afro-Jamaican villages, they also often… Read More

"Drivers in Revolt: Slavery, Leadership, and the Berbice Conspiracy of 1814"

OI Colloquium with Randy Browne This paper is part of a broader book project about the role of enslaved drivers on British Caribbean plantations. Here, Browne uses the voluminous documentation of a rebellious conspiracy in Berbice (part of what is now Guyana) and focuses on the crucial role of drivers. Some drivers were leaders of the African “nations” that… Read More