About
I am an Honorary Fellow in the Department of History. I am especially interested in slavery and racism in the United States and for many years I taught courses in these fields. My publications—including Speculators and slaves: masters, traders, and slaves in the Old South—have focused on slavery, the persistent myth of enslaver paternalism, the domestic slave trade, demography, and the nature of American racism.
I am currently working on a book whose provisional title is Fantasies of white supremacy: inside the world of American slavery and racism. This study draws on various disciplines including history, psychology, sociology, and cultural studies. The first part of my book, exploring the rhetoric and behaviours of American enslavers, is an attempt to understand the mental processes that were involved in holding human beings as property and in presenting slavery as ‘the good society.’ The second part explores what it was like to be used as human capital and constantly to be subject to the arbitrary will of a white society that thought of black people as lesser beings. I emphasise the intensely racist, capitalist and entrepreneurial nature of the enslavers’ world but argue that, against all odds, the great majority of enslaved people, rejected the idea that they were merely property to be disposed of as their enslavers saw fit. A great deal followed from this fundamental grassroots rejection of slavery and a black social world was built around it. My analysis of black agency and of resilience despite trauma is more optimistic than much of the current literature.
My work has been supported by research fellowships from organisations including the American Council of Learned Societies and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
Apart from my main academic interests, I have a keen interest in the history and culture of rugby league in Britain but more especially in France.