About me

Jake Subryan Richards is a historian of law, empire, and the African diaspora in the Atlantic world. His research concerns how enslaved and free people interacted with law in a world structured by Atlantic empires. His first book project analyzes the history of the suppression of the transatlantic trade in enslaved African people. The book investigates the legal status attributed to people ‘liberated’ from slaving ships by naval patrols and subjected to bonded apprenticeship.

He has published his research in Past and Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and Modern Intellectual History.

Richards is interested in uncovering sources that tell new stories about people who lived under slavery and post-slavery regimes. These sources range from legal records in archives to objects and images in museums. His future research projects include using museum collections to tell histories of enslavement in the Atlantic world.

Richards was previously Assistant Professor of Modern British History at Durham University. He earned his PhD at the University of Cambridge (2020) and was a Visiting Fellow in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University on a US-UK Fulbright Commission Postgraduate Scholarship (2016-2017).

Richards is a BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinker and a British Art Network Emerging Curator.

Expertise Details

African Diaspora; Comparative Methods; Enslavement; Emancipation; Empire; Law

Dr Jake Subryan Richards usually teaches the following courses in the Department:

At undergraduate level:

HY113: Empires and Resistance in Global History

HY333: Enslavement, commerce, and political formations in West Africa, c. 1550-1836

At masters level:

HY486: Practicing Abolition in the Atlantic World, c. 1807-1870

‘Political Thought and the Emotion of Shame: John Stuart Mill and the Jamaica Committee during the Governor Eyre Controversy’, Modern Intellectual History, (2022)
‘The Adjudication of Slave Ship Captures, Coercive Intervention, and Value Exchange in Comparative Atlantic Perspective, ca. 1839–1870’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 62:4 (2020)
‘Anti-Slave-Trade Law, “Liberated Africans” and the State in the South Atlantic World, c.1839–1852’, Past & Present, 241:1 (2018), pp. 179–219
‘Political Culture in Jamaica Before Anticolonial Nationalism’, History Compass, 15 (2017)

Writing & Broadcasting

• ‘Airborne’, British Art UnCanon, October 2022

• ‘Colonial Mentalities’, History Today, 70:9, September 2020, pp. 90-93

• ‘On Black Lives Matter’, Historical Association News, Autumn 2020, pp. 6-7

• ‘John Baptist Dasalu and fighting for freedom’, The Essay, Radio 3

• Contributor, ‘The Zong Massacre’, In Our Time, BBC Radio 4

• Contributor, ‘Ships and History’, Free Thinking, Radio 3

2025

Dr Jake Subryan Richards has won the Sir Julian Corbett Prize in Modern Naval History for 2024

Jake won the award for for an essay entitled: “Remaking the Middle Passage: Naval Suppression and Captive Resistance in Atlantic Africa, 1807–1850”.

Based on findings from his forthcoming book, The Bonds of Freedom (Yale University Press), the essay argued that the dynamics of suppression replicated the conditions of a transatlantic crossing for captive people.

2024

Jake Subryan Richards works as co-curator in the exhibition team behind Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance

The exhibition was displayed at the University of Cambridge Museums and has been recognized by the Association for Art History, with the award of the 2024 Curatorial Prize for Exhibitions.

The exhibition team also received a Highly Commended award from Museums + Heritage Awards 2024 for best Temporary or Touring Exhibition of the Year – Budget over £80k.

2022

New Position in Emerging Curators Group

Dr Richards has been awarded a position in the Emerging Curators Group 2021/22, organized by the British Art Network. He will undertake academic and curatorial research as part of an ongoing project with the University of Cambridge Museums.

2021

Co-winner of the Prince Consort & Thirlwall Prize and Seeley Medal

Dr Richards received the prize from the Faculty of History at Cambridge University for best doctoral dissertation. His thesis was on how abolition laws shaped the opportunities and limitations for "liberated Africans" in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Read more

2020

New article

Dr Richards' latest article was released online by the Comparative Studies in Society and History journal. “The Adjudication of Slave Ship Captures, Coercive Intervention, and Value Exchange in Comparative Atlantic Perspective, ca. 1839-1870” argues that abolition as a legal field emerged from interactions between liberated Africans, British diplomatic and naval agents, and local political elites in Brazil and on the Upper Guinea Coast.

‘On Black Lives Matter’, Historical Association News, Autumn 2020, pp. 6-7

‘Colonial Mentalities’, History Today, 70:9, September 2020, pp. 90-93

Contributor, ‘The Zong Massacre’, In Our Time, BBC Radio 4, 26 November

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Dr Jake Subryan Richards

Assistant Professor

Department of International History