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

Nicholas Crawford on Plantation Provisioning and the Politics of Health in the British Caribbean
Monday, March 2, 2020


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).