Nicholas Crawford

Nicholas (Nick) Crawford is an historian specializing broadly in slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world, with particular interests in the relationships between enslavement, bodily health, and imperial governance in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British Caribbean colonies. His research melds social, economic, and political analysis to uncover the ways in which the material conditions of enslavement shaped the development of metropolitan projects to gradually abolish colonial slavery. His current book project examines how the provision of food for enslaved laborers in the West Indian colonies was both an instrument of labor exploitation and an object of political contestation between planters, slaves, and reformers from the end of the American Revolution to Emancipation (1833). He’s also interested in pushing his research on the materiality of racial slavery in environmental directions by exploring the diverse ways in which African and African-descended people experienced and shaped American landscapes in order to establish tenuous forms of freedom on the margins of slave societies.

---