This past summer, I traveled to London, England and Coromandel, Mauritius to conduct preliminary dissertation research on a project that examines planter politics and ideology alongside the violence of slaves and freed blacks in the British Empire, with a particular focus on the Caribbean and Indian Ocean (Jamaica and Mauritius). The CLACLS Travel Fellowship helped to support my research in England, specifically at The National Archives (formerly the PRO) and at the Commonwealth House, University College London. I was able to examine the records of the Colonial Office (correspondence between colonial bureaucrats, statesman, merchants and planters as well as official government statistics, proclamations, and dispatches) and the West India Body (an association of West Indian planters and merchants) at the two respective locations, in part because of the support offered.

Later in 2019, the summer travel funds afforded me the opportunity to travel to Jamaica do conduct research at the National Library of Jamaica in Kingston and the Jamaica Archives in Spanish Town. This brief research trip was meant to inform my dissertation, specifically a chapter on the apprenticeship system in Jamaica between 1834 and 1838. In the context of examining elite ideology in the aftermath of British Empire in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean (Jamaica being the case study for the Caribbean basin), my research in Jamaica specifically focused on both Colonial Office and planter accounts of the apprenticeship period. My preliminary findings, in brief, is that there was considerable differentiation of elite views and relationship to the practice of apprenticeship. The Colonial Office, while not taking the full view of the left-wing abolitionists in Britain that apprenticeship was merely an extension of chattel slavery, did in fact view the excess of the system – in the form of corporal punishments and over work – as a problem to be remedied. The Colonial Office, though, did not seem to have significant criticism of the heightened rates of incarceration at government gaols or workhouses. The plantocracy, on the other hand, viewed the system as extending too much freedom to ex-slaves and desired to increase the levels of control over their ex-chattel.