About the Leverhulme Centre for Water Cultures
The University of Hull's Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarships Centre for Water Cultures pioneers a new, humanities-led, interdisciplinary and transhistorical research area, the ‘green-blue humanities.’
It equips a new generation of PhD students to take this agenda forward, transforming our understanding of our relationships with water and shaping future research agendas, methods, and approaches within and between disciplines.
Join our webinar – Thursday 11 March 2021
We are hosting a free webinar to help you find out more about funded postgraduate research at the Leverhulme Centre for Water Cultures. Join us to hear from programme leaders, supervisors, students and researchers and ask any burning questions at the Q&A. Register here
About this project
This is an exciting opportunity for an ambitious, talented and enthusiastic researcher to conduct interdisciplinary research in order to advance thinking within the area of blue-green humanities through researching both local customs and British inheritances around access to water.
Water was integral to the success of plantation agriculture in the British Empire during and after the period of slavery. Tropical crops such as the ‘ever-thirsty’ sugar cane were grown on islands surrounded by seas and marketed across oceans. Coerced labour was brought to places like the Caribbean and Queensland by water and remained attached to the sea and to rivers, as well as work patterns being governed by access to the water which plantation crops required. Rights of access to water and planter and state ability to harness rainfall and water supplies to plantations were essential – and as yet understudied – features of the plantation system in landscapes transformed in unprecedented ways by human activity, with significant implications for water supply. Rainfall fluctuated regionally, was seasonally variable and often insufficient.
This project will examine both local customs and British inheritances around access to water in order to contribute to a growing literature on the management of plantations and the consequences for enslaved cultures in some or all of the British Caribbean, Queensland or the Cape Colony.