Nicholas Crawford on Plantation Provisioning and the Politics of Health in the British Caribbean

Thomas Thurston talks with Nicholas Crawford on his work titled “Sustaining Slavery: Plantation Provisioning and the Politics of Health in the British Caribbean.”

Nicholas Crawford specializes in early America with particular interests in the connections between slavery, health, and empire in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British Caribbean colonies.  He received a PhD in History from Harvard University (2016), where his dissertation “Calamity’s Empire: Slavery, Scarcity, and the Political Economy of Provisioning in the British Caribbean, c. 1775-1834.” An article stemming from this research, “ ‘In the Wreck of a Master’s Fortune’: Slave Provisioning and the Planter Debt in the British Caribbean,” was published in Slavery & Abolition (2016). While at Washington University in St. Louis, Crawford will complete revisions on his book manuscript, tentatively titled, “Feeding Slavery: The Politics of Provisioning in the British Caribbean, c. 1788-1838.” He was previously a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, France (2016-19).

Recommended Resources:

• Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Penquin Books, 1985).
• Judith Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (University of California Press, 2011).
• Randy M. Browne, Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).

“Slavery and Its Legacies” is available on iTunes and SoundCloud. Email comments and suggestions to gilder.lehrman.center@yale.edu with subject line “podcast”