Patrick T . Barker

Miami Dade College, Liberal Arts, Faculty Member

Yale University, History, Graduate Student

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I am an Assistant Professor of History at Miami Dade College - Hialeah. I completed my PhD at Yale University in 2023, where I also received my M.A. and MPhil in Latin American and Caribbean History. I am currently working on my first book project, entitled "With Her Cutlass Always Raised - Slavery and Everyday Struggle in the Plantation Caribbean," which centers the everyday collective resistance strategies of enslaved people in the southeastern Caribbean between the 1760s and 1830s. Centering the island of Trinidad during the late Spanish and early British eras, the book explores this era of rapid transformation in the region from below. I am also working on other research related to these interests. The first is a study of maritime marronage in the Grenadines during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century. The second is a broader study of livestock-human relations on Caribbean plantations.

A former affiliate fellow of Yale University’s Program in Agrarian Studies, my research has been supported by fellowships from Yale University’s MacMillan Center, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, the Huntington Library, the John Carter Brown Library, the Omohundro Institute's Lapidus Fellowship, and the Library Company of Philadelphia's Program in Early American Economy and Society, among others. In 2022, research related to my book project was awarded the Ralph Lee Woodward Jr's prize from the Latin American and Caribbean section of the Southern Historical Association.

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Papers by Patrick T . Barker

Maritime Marronage and Spanish Trinidad

The Workshop, 2023

This paper foregrounds the Spanish Caribbean island of Trinidad as a known destination for mariti... more This paper foregrounds the Spanish Caribbean island of Trinidad as a known destination for maritime fugitives from slavery, emphasizing the two decades following the Seven Years' War (1756-1763). It explores the degree to which enslaved people in the protestant-governed European colonies of the Southern Caribbean at-large looked to Trinidad as a territory that might offer them a way out of slavery in a broader region where that same institution was expanding. Charting the canoe and small boat movements of enslaved people from Carriacou, Demerara, Essequibo, Grenada, and Tobago, it suggests the Spanish crown's longstanding policy of asylum in Trinidad motivated enslaved people to attempt maritime escape from both island and mainland coastlines in the region-a large. These escapes, as the paper shows, prompted planters and colonial officials to appeal to Spanish officials for fugitives' return and re-enslavement. In exploring these themes, the paper seeks to build on two key historiographies. First. historians studying maritime marronage in the colonial Caribbean have long shown Spanish Trinidad to have been a significant destination for fugitives from slavery during the eighteenth century. This paper builds on these works by foregrounding the everyday struggles of enslaved people themselves, situating their efforts within a changing Southern Caribbean in the era following the Seven Years' War. Second, scholars exploring the history of Atlantic slavery in Trinidad tend to begin their studies in 1783, when the Spanish crown offered generous incentives to prospective settlers in the hope the island would become a productive plantation colony. The crown's efforts, at least to some degree, worked. In the years that followed, plantation agriculture and racial slavery expanded on the island. By turning our attention to the two decades preceding these transformations, the paper illustrates how enslaved people across the region at-large shaped the island's history in advance of plantation agriculture's expansion.

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“Notions of Freedom”: Slavery and Escape in the Southeastern Caribbean.

William L. Clements Library Blog, 2022

Guest post by Patrick T. Barker, Clements Library 2019 Price Fellow.

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“To Work Her Grounds”: Provision Grounds, Gardens, and Subsistence in Late-Slavery Trinidad, 1824-1833.

The Journal of Caribbean History, Vol. 57, No. 1, 2023

As scholars have long shown, provision grounds and dooryard gardens were crucial to enslaved peop... more As scholars have long shown, provision grounds and dooryard gardens were crucial to enslaved people’s survival and economic lives in many slave societies in the greater Caribbean. This article draws on both old and new evidence to explore the British colony of Trinidad’s late-slavery provision ground system from below. It analyses plantation records, the Port of Spain Gazette, government slave punishment returns, planter and imperial correspondence, slave codes, and enslaved people’s legal complaints from the nineteenth century to provide a more detailed portrait of the challenges of food cultivation under slavery in the years leading to abolition. Foregrounding scarcity as the common experi- ence in the island’s provision ground system, it argues that enslaved labourers risked punishment to deploy a range of adaptive and sometimes illicit labour and land management strategies to properly cultivate their grounds under the constraints imposed upon them by plantation authorities. Furthermore, it shows how in the amelioration era, despite the odds being stacked against them, enslaved people found ways to strategically negotiate the office of The Protector of Slaves to retain rightful access to productive land and to protect their cultivation time and produce.

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