Dr Michael Bennett
Department of History
Honorary Research Fellow & Teaching Assistant
- Profile
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Thesis: Merchant Capital and the Origins of the Barbados Sugar Boom, 1627-1671.
This thesis explores the merchants in the City of London who financed the expansion of plantation slavery on Barbados in the mid-seventeenth century.
There has never been a systematic study of these merchants, which brings together archival material from the U.K., USA, and the Caribbean to analyse their involvement with Barbados in detail and place their commercial activity on the island into broader context.
By bridging the historiographies of early modern England and the Caribbean, this thesis provides new perspectives on both the London merchant community and the history of early America.
- Qualifications
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- PhD History, University of Sheffield, 2020
- MRes, University of Kent, ‘The East India Company, Transnational Interactions, and the Formation of Forced Labour Regimes, 1635-1730’. Supervised by Dr William Pettigrew and funded by a University of Kent School of History Scholarship, 2016
- BA (Hons), King’s College London, First Class Honours in History, 2015
- Grants
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Awards:
PhD scholarship: AHRC White Rose College of Arts and Humanities
- Teaching activities
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University of Sheffield Teaching Assistant 2020-21 academic year:
- HST112 Paths from Antiquity to Modernity
- HST115 The 'Disenchantment' of Early Modern Europe, c. 1570-1770
- HST11002 Land of Liberty? Rights in the USA, 1776-2016
University of Sheffield Teaching Assistant previous years:
- HST117 The Making of the Twentieth Century
- HST247 A Protestant Nation? Politics, religion and culture in England 1558-1640
- Professional activities
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- Society of Renaissance Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2020-21
- Publications and conferences
Journal articles:
- "Slaves, Weavers, and the ‘Peopling’ of English East India Company Colonies, 1660-1730" in Richard B. Allen, ed., Slavery and Forced Labour in Asia (Brill, Forthcoming).
- "Migration" in William A. Pettigrew and David Veevers, eds., Transoceanic Constitutions: The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History, 1550 – 1750 (Brill, 2019), pp. 68-97.
Book reviews:
- Review of Richard Allen, European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500-1850 (Ohio, 2015), History: The Journal of the Historical Association (December 2016).
Blog posts:
- 'The 1807 Abolition Act And British Public Memory', History Matters, March 25 2019.