Insurgent Spirits: Property, Authority, and the Politics of Alcohol in the Leeward Islands Plantation Complex

Across the early modern Leeward Islands, routine meetings of the colonial government, sociable events for the white enslavers, covert political plotting, and radical moments of care fostered by Black revolutionaries all took place over drams of rum, punch, and Atlantic wines. Rather than take this cultural touchstone as evidence of Caribbean excess, this paper will instead trace the emergent relationship between property, alcohol consumption, and political personhood as it emerged in the racialized context of the plantation complex. It places the political, economic, and patriarchal worlds created around white drinking in direct conversation with those fostered by enslaved women, men, and children to build a holistic picture of the politics of alcohol. In doing so, it seeks to give material weight to alcohol's place in buttressing the racial hierarchies that enabled the growth of Britain's Caribbean empire at the same time that enslaved African and Indigenous people repurposed these intoxicants for their own ends.  

Lila O'Leary Chambers is a historian of race, slavery, and commodification in the early modern Atlantic. After receiving her PhD from NYU in 2021, she held a position with the Register of British Slave-Traders Project at UCL, before taking up her current role as a Research Fellow at Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge. She is currently at work on the manuscript Liquid Capital: Alcohol and the Rise of Slavery in the British Atlantic forthcoming with the Omohundro Institute imprint of UNC Press. Her work has been published in Past & Present, and has been supported by the NEH, OI, Folger Library, and Huntington Library, among others. 

Respondent: Miles Ogborn is Professor of Geography at Queen Mary, University of London and Fellow of the British Academy. Ogborn is a historical geographer concerned with understanding the relationships between power, space and knowledge (or communication) in a range of mainly eighteenth-century contexts. His most recent book (The Freedom of Speech: Talk and Slavery in the Anglo-Caribbean World, 2019) investigates how different forms of talk – such as evidence giving in court, discussions of the plants that grew on the islands, and communications with the world of gods and spirits – demonstrate the complexities of the power relations of slavery and empire.