Brodie Waddell
While putting together a reading list for a new undergraduate module at Birkbeck on ‘The Early Modern World, c.1500-1750’, I decided to seek advice from the twittersphere. I was particularly annoyed that my initial list for the weeks on slavery and colonialism was overwhelmingly white.
So, with that in mind, I asked twitter for suggestions of work by people of colour and received an outstanding response:
#twitterstorians Suggestions for articles by PoC on colonialism or slavery c.1500-1750? Still too many white men on my reading list for this
— Brodie Waddell (@Brodie_Waddell) July 7, 2017
Thank you all for such a great response! I’m not going to be able to include all of suggestions in my final module list due to danger of swamping first-year undergrads with readings, but I thought it might be helpful to share the list that I collated in case other people were putting together their own lists. I’m also very keen to hear of further suggestions.
I should note a few caveats. First, I had to exclude a few excellent suggestions even from my long list as they were focused primarily on the post-1750 period, which is covered by another module. Second, there were a few publications that I don’t have access to, so I put them on a separate list too. Third, there may be errors, so let me know if I’ve miscategorised anyone. Fourth, I know that people of colour write great scholarship about all sorts of history other than colonialism and slavery, but I thought this would be a good topic to start with given the particularly egregious nature of my initial list. Finally, I’m very aware that this list is incomplete. I’d welcome the chance to update it, so please comment below with your own ideas!
Update: In 2015, Kim F. Hall and Hannah Ehrenberg created an annotated bibliography of Early Modern Race, Ethnic and Indigenous Studies which is crowdsourced and continually updated. We highly recommend it!
In the following half-decade ‘the monster’ grew two new heads – 
Our knowledge of both literal and figurative imprisonment in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is growing rapidly thanks to the on-going work of some outstanding historians and literary scholars. On Friday, a group of them assembled at Birkbeck for a ‘mini-symposium’ on the topic of ‘Writing Prisons: Literature and Constraint in Early Modern England’, where they considered ‘forms of physical, political, and aesthetic unfreedom’ at that time.
the many-headed monster 