Christopher Todd

• Slavery, Early America, African American and Afro Caribbean History

I am a historian of slavery in the Americas, broadly construed. I teach courses on slavery, early Anglo-American history, and the history of early capitalism as it developed in the Atlantic World. My immediate research interests focus on the transformation of slave subjectivity and politics in the British West Indies that took root during the period known as the Age of Revolutions. To understand and chart this transformation, my book project, tentatively titled, The Slaves' Money: Bondage, Freedom and Social Change in Jamaica, 1776-1832, examines the role that the earing and spending of money by Jamaica's enslaved men and women played in the outbreak of the Baptist Rebellion of 1831/2. The manuscript argues that the insurrection was the product of contingent economic and political forces unleashed during the Age of Revolutions. These forces served to transform and intensify everyday social and economic institutions in slave life, the challenge of which slaves were forced to meet head on. The resulting transformations served to habituate the enslaved to modern, market inflected ways of understanding and articulating notions of freedom.