Dr. Lila Chambers

Biography

Lila Chambers is a historian specializing in race, slavery, and the commodification within the early modern Atlantic. Her research examines the intertwined development of political economy, diplomacy, and race across West Africa, the Caribbean, the British Isles, and North America during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. She focuses on exploring the roles of women, children, and men from contested geographies who contributed to the shaping of value in the context of Atlantic slaveries. Currently, she is writing a book titled 'Liquid Capital: Alcohol and the Rise of Slavery in the British Atlantic, 1580-1740,' which argues for the diplomatic, social, and economic significance of alcohol in the growth of the British Empire against the backdrop of Indigenous dispossession and racial chattel slavery. Additionally, her work foregrounds the agency of African, African-descended, and Indigenous peoples who used alcohol to disrupt English control and challenge prevailing notions of its value. She is also affiliated with the Register of British Slave-Traders Project, investigating British women's roles in developing racial capitalism linked to the transatlantic slave trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Chambers is a co-founder and managing editor of Insurrect!: Radical Thinking in Early American Studies.

Research Interests