Carbon Conscripts: Slavery and the Origins of Climate Change (Gilder Lehrman Center)

Wednesday, September 13, 2023
12:00 PM
Online via Zoom
Eric Herschthal, University of Utah
Climate
Eric Herschthal is an Assistant Professor of History, University of Utah: GLC Visiting Scholar, Sept 2023
 
Carbon Conscripts explores the role racial slavery played in the origins of climate change. Focusing on the slave plantations of colonial British Atlantic world, it compares the carbon emissions of slave-grown commodities to non-slave grown commodities, and argues that slave plantations marked a key transition in the shift toward a more carbon-intensive global economy.