About me

Jake Subryan Richards is a historian of the Atlantic world and global history, with interests in legal history, the history of empires, and the African diaspora. His first book, The Bonds of Freedom: Liberated Africans and the End of the Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2025), provides a new history of slave-trade suppression. The book tells the story of people “liberated” from slaving ships by maritime patrols and then forced into bonded labour by various empires. These men and women navigated anti-slave-trade laws that both subjected them to authoritarian control and provided a domain for them to create their own visions of freedom.

Richards has published articles in Past and Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and Modern Intellectual History. His current research projects focus on African political opposition to the illegal slave trade and on ecological ideas and practices among various diasporas in the Americas.

Richards’s interests in historical methods and storytelling run through his teaching and public work: he cocurated the exhibition Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (2023–24). He has presented research on BBC Radio and written for History Today. Richards regularly consults with organizations, including museums, galleries, and charities, regarding historical research into slavery and emancipation and the implications of this research.

Richards 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). He is a BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinker.

Expertise Details

African Diaspora; Comparative Methods; Legal History; Atlantic; Global; Empire

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

“Jurisdiction and Afro-Brazilian Legal Politics from Colonialism to Early Independence,” Past & Present 265, no. Supplement 17: Ordering the Oceans, Ordering the World (2024), pp. 139–68.
“Reimagining the Dutch Connection: The Fitzwilliam Museum in a World of Atlantic Enslavement and Empire,” in Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance, ed. Victoria Avery and Jake Subryan Richards (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2023), pp. 17–39.
‘Political Thought and the Emotion of Shame: John Stuart Mill and the Jamaica Committee during the Governor Eyre Controversy’, Modern Intellectual History, 20:2 (2023), pp. 417 - 437
‘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), pp. 836 - 867
‘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.

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Dr Jake Subryan Richards

Assistant Professor

Department of International History