Author Archives: Christer Petley
Plantations and Homes
18/11/2014
This article is about the wealth and material culture of the Jamaican elite during the age of abolition. The planter class had a huge material investment in plantation slavery, and wealth derived from this allowed it to live ostentatiously and to consume conspicuously. Those who did not migrate away from Jamaica were drawn towards colonial […]
Posted in Articles Comments Off on Plantations and Homes
The Material Cultures of Slavery and Abolition
18/11/2014
This is the introduction to a special issue of the journal Slavery and Abolition, which gathered together articles by historians and archaeologists seeking to shed new light on the system of slavery, and on the processes of abolition and emancipation, in the British Caribbean. This work, some of it based on archaeological field work, some of it […]
Posted in Articles Comments Off on The Material Cultures of Slavery and Abolition
Slavery, Abolition and Empire
18/11/2014
Listen to podcasts by Christer Petley, interviewed by Christopher Prior, about slavery in the British Empire, the abolition of the slave trade and the ending of slavery. We have created these as part of a wider series in response to the choice of Jeremy Paxman’s book, Empire as the book for a University of Southampton initiative […]
Posted in S&R News and Posts Comments Off on Slavery, Abolition and Empire
Anxious Patriarchs
12/08/2014
This post is an expanded version of a comment I made today on the Junto Blog Summer Book Club discussion about Kathleen Brownâs Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs. The conversation, led by Joseph Adelman is about the final chapter of the book, on the âanxious patriarchsâ of the eighteenth-century Virginian elite. It got me thinking […]
Posted in S&R News and Posts Comments Off on Anxious Patriarchs
Empire’s Crossroads
30/07/2014
The Caribbean is, and has been, a crossroads in human history. It has been a site of convergence – where people have met, fought, exploited one another, and created new cultures. The incorporation of Caribbean colonies into Western European economies created another sort of crossroads in world history, helping to prompt a ‘great divergence’ in which nations […]
Posted in S&R News and Posts Tagged Caribbean, empire, History Comments Off on Empire’s Crossroads