@article{THESIS,
      recid = {727},
      author = {Murphy, Tessa},
      title = {The Creole Archipelago: Colonization, Experimentation, and  Community in the Southern Caribbean, c.1700-1796},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2016-03},
      number = {THESIS},
      pages = {366},
      abstract = {This manuscript situates the southern Caribbean as an  epicenter of broader contests over racial belonging,  political participation, and economic practices in the  eighteenth-century Atlantic World. Focusing on islands that  were not incorporated into the British and French empires  until after the Seven Years’ War in 1763, the project  traces the creation and persistence of a ‘Creole  Archipelago’ that united Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia, St.  Vincent, and Tobago in a shared social, economic, and  informal political space. Colonial correspondence, parish  and property records archived in the Caribbean, France,  England, and the United States enable me to reconstruct the  features of a distinctive society forged by thousands of  Amerindians, free and enslaved Africans, and poor whites  who chose or were forced to settle beyond the boundaries of  European sovereignty in early America. In the watery  borderlands of the southern Caribbean, generations of  interracial extended families created a community in which  free people of color enjoyed authority and respect;  slaveholding was practiced on a small scale; and trade was  conducted without regard to mercantilist restrictions.  Repeated attempts to assimilate or erase this community  revealed the limits of metropolitan domination, as  residents of the Creole Archipelago seized the  opportunities presented by decades of intra- and  inter-imperial conflict to re-assert their autonomy and  authority in the face of increasingly restrictive colonial  regimes. Eschewing imperial frameworks in favor of focusing  on the intimate interactions around which free and enslaved  people built their everyday lives, this work emphasizes how  creolized communities acted as a practical and ideological  challenge to European rule in early America.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/727},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/M1930R8B},
}