(Dr Christer Petley is the editor of ‘Slavery and Revolution’)
I am a historian with interests in Atlantic history, British imperial history, and Caribbean studies. I work in the Discipline of History within the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Southampton. My work has focused on the histories and legacies of slavery in the Americas, mainly on slave societies in the British Caribbean. My particular area of expertise is the history of colonial settlers and slaveholders, and I have published work on the social and cultural history of the Jamaican planter class.
My research has combined the perspectives and techniques of social, political, and cultural history to explore transatlantic connections between the Caribbean and Europe during the long eighteenth century, examining society and culture in the British West Indies, the British debate over slavery, and the transformations that reshaped the British empire in the period after the American Revolution.
I am the author of Slaveholders in Jamaica, a study of white colonial society in the period between the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and emancipation in 1838. I have guest edited a volume of the journal Atlantic Studies, ‘Rethinking the Fall of the Planter Class‘, containing articles on the planters of the British Caribbean in the period after the American Revolutionary War. I have also published a number of articles on issues such as the declining reputation of the planters, proslavery politics, planter identity, slaveholding society, and free people of colour. For full details of my publications, click here.
I am a member and former Chair of the UK Society for Caribbean Studies and a member of the Association of Caribbean Historians. At Southampton I am a theme coordinator for the Southampton Maritime and Marine Institute.