Fragile Empire with Justin Roberts

March 13 at 12pm ET/ 10am MST/ 5pm GMT

Join NACBS to celebrate Justin Roberts recent publication Fragile Empire: Slavery in the Early English Tropics, 1645-1720. Dexnell Peters will join Justin Roberts in conversation.

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Fragile Empire reinterprets the rise of slavery in the early English tropics through an innovative geographic framework. It examines slavery at English sites in tropical zones across the Atlantic and Indian oceans, and argues that a variety of factors – epidemiology, slave majorities, European rivalries, and the power of indigenous polities – made the seventeenth-century English tropical empire particularly fragile, creating a model of empire in the tropics that was distinct from other English colonizations. English people across the tropics were outnumbered by their slaves. English slavery was forged in the tropics and it was increasingly marked by its permanence, inflexibility, and brutality. Early English societies were not the inevitable precursor to British imperial dominance, instead they were wrought with internal vulnerabilities and external threats from European and non-European competitors. Based on thorough archival research, Justin Roberts' important new study redefines our understanding of slavery and bound labor from a global perspective.

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Justin Roberts is an associate professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He specializes in the study of slavery in the British Empire. He received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2009. He is the author of Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic, 1750-1807 (2013) and of many published articles and book chapters on the rise of racism and plantation slavery. His articles have appeared in several journals, including the William and Mary Quarterly, Early American Studies, the Journal of Interdisciplinary History and the Journal of Global Slavery.  

Dexnell Peters is Lecturer in Caribbean and Atlantic History at the University of the West Indies, Mona campus. He received his PhD in Atlantic History from Johns Hopkins University. Peters is broadly interested in the history of the Greater Caribbean and the Atlantic World. His current research project, through the main themes of geography and the environment, inter-imperial transitions, migration, the plantation economy, politics and religion, makes a case for the rise of a Greater Southern Caribbean region (inclusive of Venezuela and the Guianas) in the late eighteenth century, showing evidence for a very polyglot, cross-imperial and interconnected world. With Shane Pantin he is the author of The Guild of Students at UWI, St. Augustine 1962-2012.