Spence is a sixth-year student in the history department interested in the social and cultural history of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British Empire, with a particular focus on slavery and antislavery as well as Britain’s relationship with Europe. Her dissertation will explore the British acquisition of Spanish Trinidad, captured in 1797 and ceded in 1802, an important island in the evolution of British colonial administration and imperial laws. At the center of this project is the issue of slavery, with Spanish-influenced Trinidad ultimately forming the template for the amelioration program of British West Indies in the 1820s. The last chapters of the dissertation will look at how the Trinidad reforms of slavery influenced other forms of labor regulation in the nineteenth-century empire, notably indentured servitude.
