Patrick Barker

Between the 1760s and early 1800s, the Caribbean Island of Trinidad was transformed from a neglected outpost of the Spanish empire into a deadly plantation colony where slavery and sugar production structured most of rural life. “With Her Cutlass Always Raised” offers a book-length study of everyday life amidst these transformations across both late-Spanish, 1763-1797, and early British rule, 1797-1834. Centering the quotidian struggles of enslaved people who left no written traces behind, the book draws on a wide array of manuscript and print collections housed in European, Caribbean, and US archives to reconstruct the everyday and collective resistance strategies deployed to combat the labor exploitation, social isolation, poverty, and restricted mobility of life under plantation slavery on the island.