Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice

Christopher Baldwin is a historian studying the intersections of war, law, and enslavement in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. His research explores trans-imperial regimes of maritime law that enforced racial slavery and policed Black and Indigenous mobilities in the early modern Caribbean. Before coming to Brown, he defended his PhD at the University of Toronto in August 2023 before taking up a year-long fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia. He is currently working on his book manuscript, tentatively entitled An Empire of Plunder: Conquest and Enslavement in the British Caribbean, 1700–1770, that demonstrates the centrality of maritime warfare in the trans-Atlantic and inter-colonial slave trades. These investigations highlight the geopolitical dexterity of people of African and Indigenous descent by reconstructing the strategies they developed to navigate a seascape of enslavement. They also foreground bondspeople's ceaseless efforts to forge and re-forge communities amid the upheaval of colonial warfare and the dislocation of Atlantic slavery.