The Creole Archipelago: Race and Colonization in the Southern Caribbean, c. 1660-1797

Please join us for a presentation by JCB Fellow Tessa Murphy (Syracuse University, National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow).

This talk traces how physical geography and human activity worked to forge a shared social, economic, and geopolitical space at the southern reaches of the Caribbean. Focusing on a chain of islands, each one visible from the next, that were not incorporated into European empires until the 1763 Treaty of Paris, The Creole Archipelago offers a novel framework for understanding the colonial Caribbean as an interconnected space. By decentering more familiar national or imperial approaches, this framework offers new insight on colonization; the origins and extent of creolization among free, enslaved, and Indigenous populations in the early Americas; and the basis of revolutionary challenges to colonial rule.