Dr Jake Subryan Richards

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. The Times Literary Supplement named Bonds of Freedom one of its Books of the Year in 2025. BBC Radio, the Financial Times, and El País have covered his research. He has written for History Today and Project Syndicate.

Richards has published articles in Past and Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and Environmental 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 has been awarded fellowships from the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2026-27) and the Independent Social Research Foundation (2027-28) for this research.

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). 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). 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

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

Writing & Broadcasting

• Contributor, ‘Influencing History’, Free Thinking, Radio 4

• ‘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

2026

‘The Bonds of Freedom’ by Dr Jake Subryan Richards shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society’s First Book Prize

The Royal Historical Society’s First Book Prize 2026 recognises the scholarly contribution and quality of history monographs published in 2025.

Jake’s book reveals how Africans freed from the slave trade were often thrust into new forms of bondage, which they resisted in several ways, challenging narratives of abolition and freedom in the 19th-century Atlantic world.

Dr Jake Subryan Richards interviewed by leading Spanish newspaper El País

Richards discussed how his research has revealed that empires enacted new injustices through anti-slave-trade laws and the inspiring stories of people who resisted them.

You can find the article (in Spanish) HERE and you can watch a recording of the interview (in English) HERE

2025

Dr Jake Subryan Richards appears of BBC Radio 4

Dr Richards appeared on Radio 4 to discuss his recently released book ‘The Bonds of Freedom: Liberated Africans and the End of the Slave Trade’.

Jake discussed how collective actions by enslaved and free people created political change in the nineteenth century.

Listen to Dr Richards speak here

Dr Jake Subryan Richards' recent book named as one of the "Books of the Year" by the Times Literary Supplement

Jake's new book, The Bonds of Freedom: Liberated Africans and the End of the Slave Trade, has been named as one of the "Books of the Year" by the Times Literary Supplement.

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 positionin 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 Historyjournal. "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.