Browne wins best book award for Caribbean History

August 21, 2019

This summer, the Association of Caribbean Historians chose Randy M. Browne, Associate Professor of History, as the winner of the 2019 Elsa Goveia Prize. With this award, Browne’s book, Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean, was recognized out of more than 50 submissions for its excellence in the field of Caribbean history.

Struck by the extraordinary death toll of the transatlantic slave trade and American slave societies, Browne turned to a remarkable archive of first-person testimony from enslaved people in British Guyana with a simple question: how did enslaved people try to survive?  The extensive legal records from Guyana, which don’t exist for most other Caribbean slave societies, include near-verbatim testimony from plantation managers, overseers, and owners and, most importantly, enslaved people themselves. 

Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean unpacks the history of slavery through a different lens than other histories of slavery.  For decades, historians have been primarily concerned with enslaved people’s resistance to slavery and have emphasized freedom as the ultimate goal of the enslaved. Browne’s book, in contrast, argues that the central problem for most enslaved people was not how to resist or escape slavery but simply how to stay alive.  In doing so, he reorients the study of Atlantic slavery by revealing how differently enslaved people's social relationships, cultural practices, and political strategies appear when seen in the light of their unrelenting struggle to survive.

The Elsa Goveia Prize committee wrote that Browne’s work “expands and deepens our understanding of the evolving character of slavery and slave society.  Indeed, Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean offers a path-breaking contribution to our understanding of slave life and experience, in the decades preceding the end of slavery in the British Caribbean.”