Fragile Empire: Slavery in the Early English Tropics, 1645-1720

Fragile Empire reinterprets the rise of slavery in the early English tropics through an innovative geographic framework. It examines slavery at English sites in tropical zones across the Atlantic and Indian oceans, and argues that a variety of factors – epidemiology, slave majorities, European rivalries, and the power of indigenous polities – made the seventeenth-century English tropical empire particularly fragile, creating a model of empire in the tropics that was distinct from other Engl...