Lila O'Leary Chambers

My research traces the intertwined development of political economy, diplomacy, and race in West Africa, the Caribbean, the British Isles, and North America in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Taking this capacious approach to both geography and chronology allows me to appreciate similarities between early North America and the broader Atlantic, but also to draw out where its people and practices diverged. In my current book manuscript examining alcohol and slavery, for example, ideas about the appropriate place of wine, beer, and liquor functioned very differently in Indigenous and colonial Carolina than in West Africa. Attending to the worlds alcohol created allows me to offer a new history of consumption, race, and commodification in the United States. 

• Alcohol Diplomacy, Gender and Power in the Late Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast Slaving Complex. Past & Present, 264(1) 2024, 48–83. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtad020

• Co-founder and editorial board member of the online magazine Insurrect!: Radical Thinking in Early American Studies