The British Atlantic

Research Interests

Brooke Newman is a historian of early modern Britain and the British Atlantic, with current special interest in the history of slavery, the abolition movement, and the British royal family. She’s the author of "A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica" (Yale University Press, 2018), which received the Gold Medal for World History in the 2019 Independent Publisher Book Awards, was a finalist for the 2019 Frederick Douglass Book Prize awarded by the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University, and was named a 2019 Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Magazine. She is also the co-editor of "Native Diasporas: Indigenous Identities and Settler Colonialism in the Americas" (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). Her research has been extensively supported by distinguished institutions on both sides of the Atlantic, including, most recently, MacDowell, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library, and the Omohundro Institute and Georgian Papers Programme for research in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle. Dr. Newman’s current book project, “The Queen’s Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery” (under contract with Mariner), chronicles the evolving policies and attitudes of the British Crown and prominent members of the royal family toward slavery, the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans, and the abolition movement, from Elizabeth I to Queen Victoria.

Select Publications

• “The Queen’s Silence: Racism, White Supremacy and the British Monarchy,” Der Spiegel, March 12, 2021.
• “Sexual Intermixture, Blood Lineage, and Legal Disabilities in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica and the British Atlantic,” in The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism, ed. Dagmar Herzog and Chelsea Schields (May 2021).
• “‘The Case of Polly Indian’: Enslavement, Native Ancestry, and the Law in the British Caribbean,” in The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Global History, ed. Ann McGrath and Lynette Russell (September 2021).
• “Blood Fictions, Maternal Inheritance, and the Legacies of Colonial Slavery,” Women Studies Quarterly 48, no. 1 & 2 (spring/summer 2020): 27-44.
• “Slavery, Reparations, and the British Monarchy,” Slate, July 28, 2020.
• “Uncovering Royal Perspectives on Slavery, Empire, and the Rights of Colonial Subjects,” Georgian Papers Programme, January 21, 2019.
• “The Long history Behind the Racist Attacks on Serena Williams,” The Washington Post, September 11, 2018.
• "A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica" (Yale University Press, 2018).
• “Interracial Marriage in the Atlantic World,” in Oxford Bibliographies in Atlantic History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.