Researching 17th century Caribbean freedom and empire
McNeil Center for Early American Studies Advisory Council Fellow Clifton E. Sorrell III pieces together the world that shaped how people of African descent experienced slavery and freedom in the early Caribbean.
2 min. read
Clifton E. Sorrell III is an Advisory Council Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies (MCEAS). As a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Texas at Austin, his research examines how Africans and their descendants shaped the jurisdictional landscape of freedom and empire in the early Caribbean during the long seventeenth century. At Penn, he is conducting research for his dissertation, “At the heart of the Caribbean: Freedom, Empire and Sovereignty in Spanish Jamaica and Greater Antilles, 1530-1690.”
Clifton E. Sorrell III is a McNeil Center for Early American Studies Advisory Council Fellow.
(Image: Courtesy of McNeil Center for Early American History)
“I first became interested in my topic during my junior year as an undergraduate student in a graduate-student research mentorship program,” says Sorrell. “At the time, I was broadly interested in histories of Black enslaved freedom struggle and community formation. As part of the program, my graduate student mentor introduced me to digitized primary sources dealing with eighteenth-century Jamaica. That experience set the tone for what I wanted to study in graduate school.”
“My second year in graduate school, however, really reshaped the trajectory of my current research interests. I presented a paper at an MCEAS symposium celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Richard Dunn’s Sugar and Slavery that explored maroon fugitive geographies during the English conquest of Spanish Jamaica. Working with a limited set of published transcriptions left me with more questions about the islands’ enslaved and maroon communities before the conquest. These unanswered questions, in light of the sparse scholarship on Spanish colonial Jamaica, shifted my focus to enslaved and maroon communities in the early Spanish Caribbean.”
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