Join King's Medicine and the Making of Race and CEMS for two keynote lectures by Dr. Jenny Shaw (University of Alabama) and Prof. Susan D. Amussen (University of California Merced). Each keynote will think through the relationship between Barbados, Britain, racial slavery, and empire during the seventeenth century.
You are welcome to sign up for one lecture or both. Each lecture will be followed by a drinks reception.
Sign up link: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/centreforearlymodernstudies/1728270
The Women of Rendezvous, Dr. Jenny Shaw - 25th June, 17:00
Location: Nash Lecture Theatre
Speaker Bio
Dr. Jenny Shaw is associate professor of History at the University of Alabama. She is the author of Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Constructions of Difference (2013). Her second book, The Women of Rendezvous: A Transatlantic Story of Family and Slavery (2024) is a dramatic transatlantic story about five women who birthed children by the same prominent Barbados politician and enslaver. Two of the women were his wives, two he enslaved, and one was a servant in his household. All were determined to make their way in a world that vastly and differentially circumscribed their life choices. From a Barbados plantation to the center of England’s empire in London, Hester Tomkyns, Frances Knights, Susannah Mingo, Elizabeth Ashcroft, and Dorothy Spendlove built remarkable lives for themselves and their children in spite of, not because of, the man who linked them together. Dr. Shaw has just begun work on her next project tentatively titled, The Duchess and the Dandy: Gender, Race, and Spectacle in Britain’s Eighteenth-Century Empire.
Seeing Racial Patriarchy: The Empire comes home in late Stuart England, Prof. Susan D. Amussen - 26th June, 17:00
Location: Eighth Floor Open Space, History Department
Speaker Bio
Prof. Susan D. Amussen received her Ph.D. from Brown University before the internet existed. She has taught at Connecticut College and at the Union Institute and University. She is currently distinguished professor of History and Chair of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Graduate Program at UC Merced. She is the author of An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (1988); Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English society, 1640-1700 (2007); and Gender, Culture, and Politics in England, 1560-1640 (2017). She is co-editor of the forthcoming (2025) volume of the New Cambridge History of Britain (volume III, 1500-1750). She served as President of the Northeast Conference on British Studies (1997-99) and the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies (2018-20). She served as Program Chair for NACBS from 2012-14; and on the Judith Walkowitz Prize committee from 2018-21.
Caribbean Connections Workshop
Organisers: Dr Michael Bennett (University of Sheffield), Dr Misha Ewen (University of Sussex), and Dr Hannah Murphy (MMoR & CEMS, KCL)
Barbados is central to the global history of slavery. The island’s “sugar boom” in the 1640s made it the first and largest “slave society” in the seventeenth-century British empire, whose prosperity was underpinned by plantation-based chattel slavery. By the 1680s, approximately 40,000 enslaved African people were forced to labour in the Barbadian plantation economy, producing sugar and other tropical commodities for sale in European markets. Historians have long been aware that the ideas, practices, and institutions which emerged in seventeenth-century Barbados shaped the development of slavery elsewhere in the English empire, including Jamaica and South Carolina (Dunn, 1972; Roberts, 2016; Bennett, 2023). However, with some notable exceptions, the depth, extent, and strength of the connections between Barbados and English society in the formative period of the seventeenth century remain understudied (e.g. Amussen, 2007; Brewer, 2021; Newman, 2022).
This two-day workshop brings together scholars carrying out new archival research on the history of early Barbados and its reciprocal ties with early modern England, in order to share ideas about methodological approaches and explore whether foregrounding the formative period of the seventeenth century can advance our understanding of slavery, empire, and race-making. For example, we are particularly interested in using insights from histories of gender and intimate networks in the British Atlantic world to understand the role of women and families in these developments (Shaw, 2013; Fuentes, 2016; Livesay, 2018; Walker, 2020; Morgan, 2021; Ewen, 2022; Shaw, 2024).
We are also interested in examining how Caribbean slavery was “brought home” by Barbadian enslavers in the seventeenth century, by tracing their imprint on Britain’s social, economic, political, cultural, and institutional development. How does the presence and influence of Barbadian absentees and their wealth reshape how we think about important moments of political change in seventeenth-century England (e.g. the Civil War from 1642-46, the Restoration in 1660, the effort to centralise governance of the empire in the 1670s, the Exclusion Crisis in 1679-81, and the Glorious Revolution in 1688)? Did Barbadians reinvest wealth derived from enslavement into philanthropic organisations in England (e.g. hospitals, almshouses, schools, churches, and parish-level poor relief), and if so, what are the implications of this for our understanding of English social history in the early modern period? Was the geographical extent of the influence of Barbadians and their slavery-derived wealth confined to major port cities such as London and Bristol in this period, or did it percolate throughout the interior regions of England? What were the experiences of African and African-descended people in seventeenth-century England?