Eric Herschthal (University of Utah), “Carbon Conscripts: Slavery and the Origins of Climate Change” (Gilder Lehrman Center)

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.