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About Me

Lee B. Wilson is a historian of colonial British America and the early modern Atlantic world. Her research interests include the legal history of early American slave societies, colonial property law, and legal discourse.

Dr. Wilson received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia and her J.D. from Fordham University School of Law. Her book, Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America, 1660-1783, is forthcoming in July 2021 from Cambridge University Press.

Recent Publications

Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America, 1660-1783 (forthcoming July 2021, Cambridge University Press)

“From Person to Thing:  Legal Language and the Dehumanization of Slaves in British Plantation America, 1700-1763,” Studies in Law, Politics, and Society (September 2020)

“Worlds of Violence,” Review of Trevor Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650–1820 (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Terri L. Snyder, The Power to Die: Slavery and Suicide in British North America (University of Chicago Press, 2015), in Reviews in American History 44 (2016): 532-38.

“A ‘Manifest Violation’ of the Rights of Englishmen: Rights-Talk and the Law of Property in Early Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” Law and History Review 33 (2015): 543-75.

Media Coverage

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@LeeBWilson

Country Focus

United States, Colonial America, Early Modern England

Expertise by Geography

British Isles, Caribbean, United States

Expertise by Chronology

Pre-17th century, 17th century, 18th century, Early Modern

Expertise by Topic

American Revolution, American Founding Era, Colonialism, Economic History, Government, Labor, Law, Race, Slavery