Biography:

Rachel is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in the History Department whose work focuses on the social, legal, political, and economic history of Jamaica and Saint-Domingue in the eighteenth century. She is also affiliated with the Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL), where she is currently collaborating on a digital humanities project that explores the wide-ranging views and voices within the antislavery and abolitionist movements across the British and French Empires. Before pursuing graduate studies, Rachel worked as a high school history and literature teacher and continues to think critically about how we can help young people cultivate their own reading and writing practices. 

Project Title: Controlling the Antillean Internal Economy, 1763-1807

Abstract:

My dissertation explores the entanglement of commercial regulation and the policing of enslaved people’s autonomous economic exchanges in the late-eighteenth-century Anglo-French Antilles. From the emergence of free ports in the 1760s through the abolition of French slavery and the British slave trade, officials experimented with entrepôts open to foreign trade and clashed over the role of free and unfree labor within imperial spaces. These realms of commerce existed alongside thriving internal economies in which enslaved people bought and sold subsistence crops and wares. While British and French administrators tinkered with the contours of licit global commerce, they simultaneously reconfigured regulations on enslaved people’s exchanges. Using Saint Domingue and Jamaica as case studies, I argue that bonded marketers, peddlers, contracted laborers, and witnesses to illicit commercial activities shaped and were shaped by the evolution of international free trade and abolition. This project thus decouples freedom and equality from the history of the commercial agent within the British and French empires. Ultimately, the concept of economic independence itself was wrought with unstable contradictions between bondage, freedom, surveillance, permissiveness, and dependence for both enslaved and free people across the Atlantic world.