Remembering Trevor Burnard

In this post Phil Withington (University of Sheffield) presents a summary of the 2025 conference held in memory of Trevor Burnard, which was supported by the Economic History Society.

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Professor Trevor Burnard, one of the world’s leading historians of the British Caribbean and early America, died from cancer aged 63 on 19 July 2024. On 30 June 2025 colleagues, family and friends of Trevor travelled from around the world to the Institute for Historical Research in London for a two-day conference in his honour and memory. The conference was made possible by the generous sponsorship of a variety of societies and institutions, not least the Economic History Society, and this blog is a chance at once to thank the EHS and other funders for their support (see the end of this blog for the full list of funders) and to offer a couple of reflections on the event.

The first reflection is about the modus operandi of the modern historian in general and Trevor in particular.

When Trevor was first diagnosed with cancer the prognosis was not all gloomy: he had an apparently successful operation and went into remission. This meant Mark Peterson and I had time to discuss with Trevor the possibility of organising a conference which a) he could attend and b) would involve at least some colleagues with whom he had collaborated with and/or communicated with on a regular basis. Tragically, the operation proved to be less successful than hoped: the cancer spread, and Trevor died much sooner than expected. One thing that remained, however, was Trevor’s list of potential conference participants; once Mark and I decided to go ahead with organising the conference, this became our invitation list and targeted call for papers.

There were several striking features about Trevor’s list. First, it was very long, containing 70+ people whom he thought about ‘off the top his head’. Second, it was very diverse. As well as a happy mix of men and women at different stages of their career, it included people from all his previous universities (West Indies, Waikato, Canterbury, Brunel, Sussex, Warwick, Melbourne, the Wilberforce Institute) as well as researchers and research groups in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, North America, Jamaica, New Zealand, and Australia. Third, almost everyone we contacted replied swiftly to accept the invitation and a high proportion also offered to give papers (the conference crammed together 9 panels of 3 or 4 speakers (32 speakers in all), with 70+ participants on both days).

The list made it very clear that Trevor was extremely well-networked in terms of his intellectual contacts, that he was a collegiate and community-minded colleague who made close connections at the institutions he worked in, that he was adept at keeping old contacts and making new ones. But the most surprising feature of the list only became apparent once speakers began giving their papers on the day. It quickly became clear that not only had almost all the 32 speakers prepared bespoke papers speaking to Trevor’s work directly; most of them were presenting papers linked directly to active collaborations or long-term and ongoing discussions with Trevor. That is, the list revealed Trevor as a profoundly collaborative historian: not simply a historian who applied for funded research projects (though Trevor did plenty of those), but one who did history through genuine and meaningful discussion, sharing, cooperation, and partnerships with others.

The second reflection is how the conference made clear Trevor’s positioning in the vanguard of several sets of pressing contemporary themes and concerns. The dynamics, experiences, consequences, and legacies of Caribbean and early American plantation slavery have become mainstream historical topics over the last few decades; panels at the conference accordingly zoomed in on ‘Plantations and Economies’, ‘The Atlantic Slave Trade’, ‘Slavery, Revolution and Empire’, and ‘19^th Century Slavery and Emancipation’. Trevor was an early proponent of ‘trans-Atlantic’ and latterly global history as a way of thinking about national histories (indeed, the first I time I met him he berated me for not considering the Atlantic world as part of British history) and other panels talked about ‘Britain and Slavery’, ‘French/Atlantic History’, ‘The American Revolution’, and ‘Empires Beyond the Atlantic’.

While those of us outside the field of Caribbean history have, in many respects, caught up with Trevor thematically over the last few decades, a wonderful final panel on ‘Trevor as Historian’ signalled his independent and sometimes uncompromising way of approaching issues, his expansive curiosity and mischievous contrariness, his innate humanity and intellectual honesty, and his commitment to reducing complex and difficult problems to their core and key elements.

Given the quality of the papers and debate Trevor would, we think, have appreciated the conference. From the spat in the first panel over the connections between slavery and industrialisation (between Maxine Berg and Pierre Gervais) to Simon Newman’s concluding and careful analysis of Trevor’s most influential book, about Thomas Thistlewood, he would have been rolling up his sleeves and getting involved. It is a modus operandi and historiographical contribution worth remembering.

For reference:

Funders of Power, Slavery, and Culture in the Trans-Atlantic World: A Conference in Memory of Trevor Burnard (IHR, 30 June and 1 July 2025): the Institute of Historical Research, the Economic History Society, Brepols Publishers and the Bibliography of British and Irish History, The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Wilberforce Institute, the GIS Sociabilités, the University of Sheffield and the University of Warwick.

To contact the author:

Prof Phil Withington

p.withington@sheffield.ac.uk

University of Sheffield