Britain’s colonies in northeastern North America were inextricably linked to the Caribbean between 1630 and 1815. While previous scholarship has emphasized the region’s important economic connections with the plantation colonies of the Caribbean, more recent scholarship on the early modern Atlantic world has centered slavery as the key institution that sat at the heart of the entire system. At the same time, a burgeoning literature explores slavery in the northern mainland colonies and Atlantic Canada. Yet, much of that research remains locally focused and largely disconnected from the scholarship on slavery in the wider Atlantic world.

Works such as Mark Peterson’s City-State of Boston (2019) offer a new perspective, examining political economy and exploring the lives of individuals connected to slavery. Scholars have also established that colonists from Pennsylvania, New York, New England, and Atlantic Canada were crucial intermediaries in the Atlantic economy, serving as an important source of provisions and manufactured goods, trafficking African and Indigenous captives, and engaging in interimperial and extra-legal trade to the slave societies of the Caribbean. If Caribbean slavery was the “plantation machine” at the center of the Atlantic economy, colonists in northeastern North America provided the fuel and fodder to keep that machine running.

With this metaphor in mind, this roundtable aims to expand historians’ understanding of the relationship between northeastern North America and the Caribbean. Moving beyond the parochialism that often still characterizes the scholarship on the northern colonies, it takes stock of the connections to West Indian slavery and provides new perspectives on the provisioning trade, slave trade, absentee plantation ownership, and non-economic relations such as intermarriage and intellectual exchange. Ultimately, examining the northern colonies and their connection to Caribbean slavery better illuminates the entanglements that characterize Atlantic history and allows us to tell a more complete story.

This roundtable brings together American and Canadian historians to examine this phenomenon more holistically. The panelists will use their expertise to address three questions regarding the interconnection of the northern colonies and Caribbean. First, how does centering Caribbean slavery in the study of northeastern North America change how scholars should consider those places? Second, how can the inclusion of sources from the northern colonies and the Caribbean help us better understand Atlantic slavery? How does it affect or change our view of places that have been long studied? Finally, what is next for the scholarship on slavery in the northeastern colonies? Where should scholars turn their attention and what are some possibilities for future research? In the end, these questions will allow the panel to have a wide-ranging conversation about and encourage audience participation in what is an important conversation in the historiography of the early modern Atlantic world.