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 complex structures of economy and political culture. Colonial officials relied on alcohol to fund fortifications, pay salaries, and provide the colonies’ only ready money. Within the plantation, enslaved women and men labored to produce the rum that kept their enslavers’ finances and labor forces afloat. They nonetheless refused to be fully subsumed within the economic logics of their enslavers. Enslaved people, forced to produce rum, used alcohol to momentarily reject their commodified status, engaging in an illicit economy of alcohol sales, as well as shared consumption in order to form bonds of sociality and political affiliation essential to (re)forming community under slavery.
Lila O’Leary Chambers is currently a research fellow with the AHRC-funded project the Legacies of the British Slave Trade at University College London. Previously, she was a postdoctoral associate with the Atlantic Slavery and its Afterlives Program at New York University. Dr. Chambers specializes in the history of slavery, consumption, and empire in the early modern Atlantic World. Her book manuscript, Liquid Capital: Alcohol and the Rise of Slavery in the British Atlantic moves through Ireland, West Africa, the slaving ship, the Caribbean, and the Native Southeast to argue for the diplomatic, social, and economic importance of alcohol to the growth of a British empire premised in Indigenous dispossession and chattel slavery. Her work has been generously supported by the McNeil Center of Early American Studies, the Huntington Library, and the Folger Library, among others.
ABOUT OI COLLOQUIA
The OI’s Colloquium Series is an ongoing seminar for scholars to present their work in progress for graduate students and colleagues. Advanced registration is required. All participants read the pre-circulated paper and prepare to engage in generous and generative feedback.
When we meet in person we are limited by the size of the OI’s conference room; online we limit registration to 40 (a typical size for the colloquium). No recordings are made of the discussions and no tweeting or posting on other social media platforms during the event is permitted in order to encourage this intellectual community of trusted exchange.
COPIES OF THE COLLOQUIUM PAPER ARE AVAILABLE ONE WEEK IN ADVANCE.
Contact Beverly Smith for your copy.
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 repeat the claim that Afro-descended peoples from one of those communities, the region around Porus, either “died out in the 1670s, fled to Cuba, or merged” with the Windward Maroons in eastern Jamaica. Reading across imperial archives, however, reveals that the Porus captives did not disappear or die out, they were trafficked off of the island by an English ship captain. This chapter is part of a larger project on human trafficking in the seventeenth-century Caribbean and focuses specifically on the experiences of captives trafficked across imperial boundaries during moments of war.
Casey Schmitt is a historian of early America and the Caribbean, with particular interests in human trafficking, colonization, and illicit economies over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In her research and her teaching, she is interested in tracing individuals who crossed imperial boundaries—by choice and by coercion—in order to understand how processes like colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and trade functioned in the interstices of early modern empires. She is currently at work on a book manuscript, tentatively titled The Predatory Sea: Human Trafficking, Colonization, and Trade in the Greater Caribbean, 1530-1690, which analyzes the ubiquity of human trafficking and captivity in the greater Caribbean and North America from the 1530s until the 1690s and what that meant for colonization, trade, and warfare in the region. At Cornell, she teaches classes on colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and corruption.
ABOUT OI COLLOQUIA
The OI’s Colloquium Series is an ongoing seminar for scholars to present their work in progress for graduate students and colleagues. Advanced registration is required. All participants read the pre-circulated paper and prepare to engage in generous and generative feedback.
When we meet in person we are limited by the size of the OI’s conference room; online we limit registration to 40 (a typical size for the colloquium). No recordings are made of the discussions and no tweeting or posting on other social media platforms during the event is permitted in order to encourage this intellectual community of trusted exchange.
COPIES OF THE COLLOQUIUM PAPER ARE AVAILABLE ONE WEEK IN ADVANCE.
Contact Beverly Smith for your copy.
OI Colloquium with Kenneth Banks
Drawn from a biography (Ch. 5) of an angry, social ambitious Connecticut sea captain, Thomas Allen, and his family during the era of the American Revolutionary Atlantic, this chapter examines how a ‘middling’ free Settler like Allen escaped a massive debt load through illicit trade during the Seven Years’ War. The book is an attempt to situate the lives of the ‘middling sort’ in ‘Vast Early Maritime America.’
Kenneth Banks is a graduate of Queen’s University, Canada. He attended the second Harvard Atlantic Seminar (1997) under the late Bernard Bailyn. His first book Chasing Empire (2002) examined the limits of communications in what was then the new field of the French Atlantic. He has just begun scouting publishers for his second manuscript, a biography of angry, socially ambitious, British-American mariner and the world of his seaborne mobility in the ‘long’ American Revolution. He teaches Atlantic and American Legal History at Wofford College, a small liberal arts college in South Carolina.
ABOUT OI COLLOQUIA
The OI’s Colloquium Series is an ongoing seminar for scholars to present their work in progress for graduate students and colleagues. Advanced registration is required. All participants read the pre-circulated paper and prepare to engage in generous and generative feedback.
When we meet in person we are limited by the size of the OI’s conference room; online we limit registration to 40 (a typical size for the colloquium). No recordings are made of the discussions and no tweeting or posting on other social media platforms during the event is permitted in order to encourage this intellectual community of trusted exchange.
COPIES OF THE COLLOQUIUM PAPER ARE AVAILABLE ONE WEEK IN ADVANCE.
Contact Beverly Smith for your copy.
