Prospects of Empire: Slavery and Ecology in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain

A Note about the Exhibit

Prospects of Empire Goes Online

The Lewis Walpole Library is pleased to present online Prospects of Empire: Slavery and Ecology in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain thereby making its content available to wider audiences interested in the role of 18th-century archives and special collections as resources for talking about race and for teaching the history and persistence of racism and racialized violence.

The exhibition, curated by Hazel V. Carby, Charles C & Dorothea S Dilley Professor, African American Studies & American Studies Emerita, and Heather Vermeulen, Visiting Assistant Professor of Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Wesleyan University, was first organized in collaboration with the Lewis Walpole Library and was on view in Farmington November 17, 2014 – May 1, 2015. The exhibition coincided with Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain at the Yale Center for British Art, October 2 – December 14, 2014. The organizers of these two exhibitions jointly hosted a two-day workshop for graduate students Representing Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain.

The following two subsequent publications by the exhibition curators may also be of interest.

             Hazel V. Carby, Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands. (London; New York: Verso,  2019).

             Heather V. Vermeulen. "Thomas Thistlewood’s Libidinal Linnaean Project." Small Axe: A Journal of  Criticism 22, no. 1 (03/01/2018): 18-38. doi:10.1215/07990537-4378900.