BA (Dal/King's), MA (Queen's), PhD (Toronto)
Chris (he/him) holds a BA in Early Modern Studies and History from the University of King’s College and Dalhousie University. He completed an MA in History at Queen’s University and a PhD in History at the University of Toronto in 2023. His research focuses on histories of war and enslavement in the 18th-century Caribbean, grounding detail-oriented analyses of legal processes of enslavement in critical approaches to the colonial archive.
Chris’s book project, An Empire of Plunder: Conquest and Enslavement in the Caribbean, 1700–1770, is under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press. It shows how European warships raided coastal settlements, seized slave ships and targeted Black mariners on board merchant vessels, contributing to the entrenchment of racial slavery amid the expansion of the plantation system. His book seeks to reorient histories of imperial warfare around the experiences of enslaved captives by highlighting the impact of colonial rivalry on individuals, families and communities.
Peer-Reviewed Articles:
“An Enslaved Community, Imperial Warfare, and the 1746 Invasion of Saint-Barthélemy,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 82, no. 4 (October 2025): 603–44.
Works in Progress:
An Empire of Plunder: Conquest and Enslavement in the Caribbean, 1700–1770. Under advanced contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press.
“Captives in the Quaker City: Philadelphia Privateers, Caribbean Warfare, and Maritime Enslavement in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World,” Early American Studies, under peer-review.
