November 20, 2019, by ahzsa

Sheryllynne Haggerty starts Leverhulme Fellowship

This year, courtesy of support from a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, Dr. Sheryllynne Haggerty will be working on a new monograph tentatively titled “Merchants and Managers; Sojourners and Slaves.”  Her goal is to produce the first in-depth examination of the lives of ordinary Jamaican people at the start of the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763).  A rare set of letters written by merchants, planters, and visitors (sojourners) to Jamaica provides a prism through which she will explore the lived experience of a wide spectrum of Jamaican society, including women and the enslaved, against the vast back-drop of trans-Atlantic slavery. This project will bring together economic, social, cultural, political and medical history to provide new insights into everyday life in Jamaica at this important juncture in British imperial history. The hundreds of letters and associated documents are part of the ‘Prize Papers’ collection held at the National Archives at Kew.  Whilst the letters are all from white people, an iterative methodology, employing additional sources, will allow Sheryllynne to look at the lives of people of colour, both free and enslaved, as well.   Sheryllynne has previously worked on the British-Atlantic trading community and the slave trade of the eighteenth-century, but closely studying this fascinating window onto Jamaican slave society is a new and exciting opportunity for her.

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