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Dr Jake Subryan Richards

Assistant Professor
Department of International History

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About

About

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.

Other titles: Undergraduate tutor (2nd year)

Expertise

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