Chris Baldwin

BA (Dalhousie/King’s), MA (Queen’s), PhD Candidate (Toronto)

Pronouns: he/him

Chris Baldwin is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Toronto and a Part-Time Instructor in the Early Modern Studies Program. He received his BA in History and EMSP from Dal/King’s in 2015 and an MA in History from Queen’s University in 2016. He became a PhD candidate in 2017 and is interested in legal histories of slavery and warfare in the British Atlantic world.

Chris is currently completing his SSHRC-supported Doctoral dissertation entitled “An Empire of Plunder: Slavery and the Prize Economy in the British Caribbean, 1739–1763.” His research explores the intertwined histories of slavery and the British Empire in the Atlantic world, focusing on the enslavement of Black captives during Britain’s eighteenth-century wars. Drawing on extensive archival research in the UK, the US, Bermuda, and Antigua, he shows how Black sea-goers navigated the wartime Caribbean as European empires increasingly read Blackness as a marker of enslavability.

Conference Presentations

• 2020 “An Island of ‘Little Consequence’: British Privateers and the 1746 Slave Raid on Saint- Barthélemy,” Captivities, Confinement, and Incarceration Workshop, North American Conference of British Studies, Chicago, USA.
• 2019 “The Maritime Enslavement of Francisco Menéndez,” The Problem of Piracy, Glasgow, UK.
• 2017 “‘The Presbyter-Turks’: Islam, Religious Dissent, and Political Identity in Restoration Political Ballads,” Global Reformations, Toronto, Canada.

Research Interests

Caribbean History, History of the Atlantic World, Slavery, Privateering and Piracy, Royal Navy, Smuggling, Legal History, Imperialism, Early America, Early Modern Britain