Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: Early Modern Caribbean, Atlantic World, Race, Slavery, Family, Labor, Everyday Life, Archives.

About Me: I am currently working on my second book project examining the interracial family born to wealthy planter John Peers in seventeenth-century Barbados. Provisionally entitled, The Planter’s Progeny: Family and the Formation of an Atlantic World, 1630-1730, this project traces the lives of the five women with whom John fathered children (including two English wives, two enslaved women, and a white woman from Barbados), his eighteen offspring (enslaved and free), and their descendants. Mining legal records, deeds, wills, plantation inventories, Colonial Office correspondence, shipping logs, and ecclesiastical documents from England, West Africa, and the Caribbean, I am investigating how the experiences of this multi-generational family both reflect and challenge the hierarchies, labor systems, and mobility that characterized the early modern British Atlantic World.

Recent Publications: Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, Early American Places Series, 2013).

“In the Name of the Mother: The Story of Susannah Mingo, a Woman of Color in the Early English Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 77 (2020): 177-210.

“Birth and Initiation on the Peers Plantation: The Problem of Creolization in Seventeenth-Century Barbados” Slavery and Abolition, vol. 39 (2018): 290-314.

“The Early English Caribbean: Conflict, the Census, and Control,” in The World of Colonial America: An Atlantic Handbook, ed. Ignacio Gallup-Diaz (New York and London: Routledge, 2017).

with Kristen Block, “Subjects without an Empire: The Irish in the Early Modern Caribbean,” Past and Present, no. 210 (Feb 2011): 33-60.

Expertise by Chronology: Pre-17th century, 17th century, 18th century, Early Modern