Capitalism and Slavery

Andrew O’Shaughnessy is the Saunders Director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello and a professor of history at the University of Virginia.  He is the author of The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire (2013) and An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (2000).  He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society; and a member of the advisory council of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies; a member of the advisory board of the Gilder Lehrman Institute. His forthcoming book, “The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind:” Thomas Jefferson’s Idea of a University, will be published by the University of Virginia Press in September 2021.

Dr. Stephen Mullen is a historian of slavery and its legacies in the British Atlantic world, with an emphasis on Scotland and the Caribbean. He is an alumnus of the Universities of Strathclyde and Glasgow, completing a PhD at the latter in 2015. A monograph, The Glasgow Sugar Aristocracy: Scotland and Caribbean Slavery 1775-1838, is forthcoming with the Royal Historical Society’s New Historical Perspectives Series. From 2015, he has been a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer in History at the University of Glasgow.

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley where she specializes in African-American history, women’s and gender history, and the history of American slavery. She is also the Chancellor’s Professor of History (2021-2024). She is the author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, which won the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery 2020 Harriet Tubman Prize for the best nonfiction book published in the United States on the slave trade, slavery, and anti-slavery in the Atlantic World, the Southern Association for Women’s Historians 2020 Julia Cherry Spruill Prize awarded for the best book in southern women’s history, the Southern Historical Association’s 2020 Charles S. Sydnor Award which is awarded for the best book in southern history published in an odd-numbered year, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic’s 2020 Best Book Prize, and the Organization of American Historians’ 2020 Merle Curti Prize for the best book in American social history. Jones-Rogers is also the first African-American and the third woman to win the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History since the award’s inception in 1980. She is hard at work on a new book tentatively titled Women of the Trade, which centers the experiences of African, Afro-English, and English women in the story of the British Atlantic slave trade.

Ronald W. Bailey is head of the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a 1965 graduate of Evans County History School in Claxton, GA, and a 1969 Phi Beta Kappa graduate with a BA in Liberal Arts (Cross-Cultural Studies) from Michigan State University’s Justin Morrill College. His undergraduate major included fluency in Russian, and a study/travel program and certificate from Moscow State University. He holds an MA in Political Science from Stanford and a Ph.D. in Black Studies from Stanford, the first such degree awarded in the United States. He has taught at Fisk University, Cornell, Northwestern, the University of Mississippi, Savannah State University, and Northeastern University, where he chaired the Department of African-American Studies for eight years. He also served as Vice President for Academic Affairs at South Carolina State University and Knoxville College, and as a senior scientist with the Education Development Center, Inc. Since 2012, he has been Head of the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois. He is writing a book tentatively titled Those Valuable People, the Africans on the slave(ry) trade’s role in U.S. and global history, especially the trade in slaves and cotton and the industrial revolution. He is also currently the co-principle investigator of a Mellon Foundation project to expand the use of digital tools in studying the Black experience.