The horrors of plantation slavery are a ubiquitous presence in modern retellings of the previous, as portrayed in movie or taught in faculties and universities; a characteristic of our vivid however typically too simplistic understanding of empire and its evils.
Trevor Burnard, a historian of the Caribbean and early America who has died from most cancers aged 63, did greater than most to disclose the specifics of the callous and sordid nature of the relationships between planters and enslaved individuals, particularly in his finest identified e-book, Mastery, Tyranny & Want: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves within the Anglo-Jamaican World (2004).
Trevor used the ten,000 pages of Thistlewood’s diary to create a revealing – and horrifying – microhistory of the sheer brutality of slavery in Jamaica, and of the informal bodily and sexual violence that was the expertise of untold numbers of enslaved Jamaicans.
His examine of Thistlewood is not any caricature. It explores with nuance the ability dynamics that gave enslaved individuals the technique of “opposition” to their enslavers – Trevor was cautious of overusing the time period “resistance”.
Thistlewood, for instance, coerced a lot of his feminine slaves into intercourse, however Trevor’s account additionally particulars no less than 10 events on which Phibbah, the enslaved girl with whom Thistlewood had probably the most sustained relationship, was in a position to flip down his sexual calls for.
In different contexts, too, Trevor was within the methods during which – borrowing EP Thompson’s phrase – the ethical economic system of slavery might present (very restricted) methods for the enslaved to push again towards enslavers who violated their expectations on such issues as overwork, extreme and unprovoked violence, or insufficient take care of the sick.
His work linked Atlantic plantation slavery to early capitalism and to world financial methods, however Trevor additionally discovered revolutionary methods of discovering the voices of the enslaved themselves inside the archives compiled by their masters or by imperial authorities, notably in his Listening to Slave Voices: Slave Testimony from Berbice (2010). Historical past, for Trevor, needed to be rooted within the main sources. With out first-hand acquaintance with the proof, no actual understanding or sound judgment was doable.
He was an exemplary historian with a mastery of archival analysis, which he utilized in instructing college students in universities within the Caribbean, New Zealand and the UK, in addition to in his 14 books (with extra in press) and greater than 50 articles and an identical variety of essays in books.
From 2019 he was Wilberforce professor of the historical past of slavery and emancipation on the College of Hull, additionally serving as director of the Wilberforce Institute for the Examine of Slavery and Emancipation within the metropolis. He dropped at the position his in depth worldwide networks, his beneficiant help for different students, and his undertaking management, together with involving the Wilberforce Institute in exploring the historic slavery hyperlinks of the founders of the Guardian, which has led to an apology by its present proprietor, the Scott Belief, and a programme of restorative justice totalling greater than £10m by the following decade.
Born in Dunedin, New Zealand, Trevor was the son of Dorothy (nee Milne) and Ray Burnard. Ray was initially a fruit and vegetable wholesaler, till he and Dorothy purchased and ran a motel in Invercargill, the place Trevor went to highschool. He then went to the College of Otago, initially to review legislation earlier than switching to historical past. A PhD on the Johns Hopkins College, Baltimore, adopted, accomplished in 1989, and later revealed as Creole Gents: The Maryland Elite, 1691-1776 (2002).
Trevor’s first educational submit was as a lecturer in historical past on the College of the West Indies (1987-89), the place he “did the archival work on early Jamaica that … sustained me for my total profession up to now”.
Returning to New Zealand he spent a 12 months on the College of Waikato, then joined the historical past division on the College of Canterbury in Christchurch in 1990, laying down there the foundations for his Thistlewood e-book.
In 2000 he got here to the UK for the primary time to take up a readership in early American historical past at Brunel College, and commenced there an extended succession of educational management and administration roles. He was appointed professor of American historical past on the College of Sussex in 2004, shifting to College of Warwick after three years to grow to be professor within the historical past of the Americas.
In 2011 he took up the position of professor and head of college on the College of Melbourne, however was pleased to return to the UK to take up his roles as Wilberforce professor at Hull and director of the Wilberforce Institute.
A historian by and thru, Trevor nicely understood the toxic legacy of slavery and the slave commerce, however wouldn’t enable its horror to deflect him from the historian’s process of understanding.
Working in a discipline that fuels many modern ideological battles, he refused to be pigeon-holed. He was plain-spoken, respecting few shibboleths of left or proper. He pulled no punches; in his instructing, he issued no set off warnings, even whereas asking his college students to review episodes of appalling inhumanity. Studying to look actuality within the eye was, to his thoughts, what schooling was all about.
His most up-to-date work centered on empire, each the imperial context of early American historical past and the centrality of empire to the worldwide historical past of slavery. His newest e-book, Writing the International Historical past of Slavery (2023), argued that slavery in antebellum America shouldn’t be seen because the default mannequin for all slavery. The historic methods of slavery that had been central to empires had been principally very totally different.
Trevor had a exceptional expertise for friendship – we had been shut pals for greater than 30 years since we first labored collectively in Christchurch – and his kindness and help for colleagues and college students was a lot admired.
He – alongside along with his spouse, Deborah Morgan, a librarian, whom he married in 1991 – constructed a world community of collaborators and pals.
Deborah survives him, as do his youngsters, Nicholas and Eleanor, his mom, Dorothy, and his brothers, Murray and Russell.
