The five participants in this conversation have followed different paths to the intersection of labor history and the history of science but share common research questions regarding the relationship of coercion, colonialism, and scientific knowledge production. Collectively their scholarship is global in scope and offers the opportunity to think comparatively across a range of colonial regimes, populations, scientific disciplines, and modes of labor mobilization. Their inquiries emphasize the importance of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries to the structures of knowledge and power that continue to organize the modern world, while also suggesting that historians of more recent periods might gain theoretical insights from studies of a more distant past. This conversation began in Philadelphia in June 2022, unfolded diachronically in early 2023, and has been edited for clarity. An appendix contains citations for scholarship mentioned in the text.
Entanglements of Coerced Labor and Colonial Science in the Atlantic World and Beyond
PATRICK ANTHONY is an Irish Research Council Fellow at University College Dublin and a research partner of the project “Instructing Natural History: Nature, People, Empire” at Uppsala University. He is currently writing a history of extractive industries and environmental sciences that linked central Europe to Ibero-America and northern Eurasia in the long nineteenth century.
JODY BENJAMIN is assistant professor of history at the University of California, Riverside, and lead PI of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar 2022–23, “Unarchiving Blackness.” His book The Texture of Change: Dress, Self-Fashioning, and History in Western Africa, 1700–1850 is forthcoming.
NICHOLAS B. MILLER is assistant professor of history at Flagler College and coeditor of the forthcoming volume Plantation Knowledge. His research was advanced through a project funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant No. 889078.
Zachary Dorner, Patrick Anthony, Jody Benjamin, Nicholas B. Miller, Kate Luce Mulry; Entanglements of Coerced Labor and Colonial Science in the Atlantic World and Beyond. Labor 1 March 2024; 21 (1): 11–26. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10948894
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