Matthew Dziennik’s current book project explores the role of soldiers in the making of the British Empire between c. 1750 and 1830. Rejecting the view that locally-recruited manpower served merely as an exotic adjunct to "British" troops, the book sees soldiers as a form of labor and examines the way that labor negotiations through recruitment shaped the political, economic, social, and ideological parameters of the British Empire. As one of the few arenas which the British believed they could control, soldiers became a centerpiece of shifting approaches to colonial governance. Yet, this predominately unfree source of military labor rarely solidified British authority. Just as labor can be understood as a series of asymmetric dependencies, British colonialism rested on a foundation of shifting asymmetric dependencies that tied British imperialism to local practices and decision-making. The project challenges assumptions about the relationship between unfree and coerced labor, inverting the idea that slavery eased the mobilization of colonial labor.
Matthew Dziennik is Assistant Professor for British and British Imperial History at the United States Naval Academy and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh (2011). In June and July 2023, Matthew is a Fellow at the BCDSS. He is currently engaged in writing the first global history of recruitment in the British Empire. His project at the BCDSS examines how British efforts to purchase and recruit enslaved soldiers in Senegambia, Sierra Leone, and the Gold Coast shaped the colonial process across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His publications include “The Fatal Land: War, Empire, and the Highland Soldier in British America” (New Haven, 2015) and articles in the English Historical Review, Slavery & Abolition, and The William and Mary Quarterly.
The workshop is open to all members of the BCDSS, including Ph.D. candidates and M.A. students.
This workshop series is organised by the Research Group "The Concept of Slavery in African History".
Mary Afolabi
Boluwatife Akinro
Ricardo Márquez García
Jutta Wimmler
Lukas Wissel