Hines Prize Announcement: Huw T. David, The Atlantic at Work: Britain and South Carolina’s Trading Networks, c. 1730 to 1790

CLAW Hines Prize Winner, 2015

CLAW Hines Prize Winner, 2015

Announcement from College Today, article by Hannah Ashe

The College of Charleston’s Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World (CLAW) program’s biennial Hines Prize has been awarded to Huw T. David for his book-manuscript entitled The Atlantic at Work: Britain and South Carolina’s Trading Networks, c. 1730 to 1790.

The prize, endowed by former College of Charleston Dean Samuel Hines, is awarded every other year for the best first manuscript on a topic relating to the Carolina Lowcountry and/or Atlantic World.

“David’s manuscript presents a compendious history of the trade relations between South Carolina and Great Britain in the eighteenth century, both in the decades leading up to the Revolutionary War and immediately following the Revolution,” CLAW director Simon Lewis said.

David’s manuscript derives from his thesis at Oxford University, for which he used a collective biography of  some two dozen “Carolina traders.” His study offers new insights into the political economy of Carolina trade with Great Britain and its impact on Atlantic politics in the era of the American Revolution. David’s study reveals how these men’s trading activity at first acted as a stabilizing force but from the 1760s on aggravated intra-imperial discord. After the Revolution, according to David, Carolinians exercised greater commercial discretion than contemporaries and historians have appreciated. David’s work thus challenges contentions of South Carolina’s continuing commercial subservience to British trading interests.

In the context of remarkably strong competition, with manuscripts on topics ranging from the Civil War to African and African American watermen, the Hines Prize committee praised David’s manuscript especially for its placing of the Lowcountry squarely at the center of Atlantic World geo-politics in the critical decades before, during, and immediately after American independence.

David works as a Development Officer at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University. He has previously published a number of articles in academic journals and he has held visiting fellowships at institutions including the University of South Carolina and the Huntington Library, Los Angeles.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Hines Prize 2015

The Hines Prize is awarded to the best first book relating to any aspect of the Carolina Lowcountry and/or the Atlantic World. The prize carries a cash award of $1,000 and preferential consideration by the University of South Carolina Press for the CLAW Program’s book series. If you have a manuscript on a topic pertaining to the Carolina Lowcountry and/or Atlantic World, please send a copy to CLAW Director Simon Lewis at lewiss@cofc.edu before May 15, 2015. If you have graduate students with potential manuscripts that could contend for the Prize, please make sure that they know of this biennial opportunity.

Previous winners of the Hines Prize are as follows:

  • 2013 – Dr. Tristan Stubbs – The Plantation Overseers of Eighteenth-Century Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia
  • 2011 – Dr. Michael D. Thompson – In Working on the Dock of the Bay: Labor and Life along Charleston’s Waterfront, 1783-1861
  • 2009 – Barry Stiefel – Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic World: A Social and Architectural History
  • 2007 – T.J. Desch-Obi – Fighting for Honor: The History of African Martial Art Traditions in the Atlantic World
  • 2005 – Nicholas Michael Butler – Votaries of Apollo: The St. Cecilia Society and the Patronage of Concert Music in Charleston, South Carolina, 1766-1820
  • 2003 – Bradford Wood – This Remote Part of the World: Regional Formation in Lower Cape Fear, North Carolina, 1725-1775

The 2013 Hines Prize winner was Dr. Tristan Stubbs, who received the award for his dissertation manuscript The Plantation Overseers of Eighteenth-Century Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia. The study focuses on plantation overseers in eighteenth-century Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia, subjects long-neglected in the historiography of American slavery. These men were the arbiters of violent punishment for many thousands of bondpeople. They represented not only the cruel régime imposed by slaveholders, but also the vicious authority of slave societies that designated the oversight system the first line of defense against enslaved resistance. Although violence was practiced and encouraged by plantation owners in the early years of the eighteenth century, the latter decades witnessed a shift in their attitudes. By late century, planters lambasted overseers for their intrinsic violence, their passionate tempers, and their universal barbarity towards slaves. As winner of the Hines Prize, Dr. Stubbs receives prize-money of $1000 as well as expedited publication by USC Press in their Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World series.

 

Dr. Tristan Stubbs lectures in Addlestone Library

On Thursday, October 30, 2014, the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World program continued the Wells Fargo Distinguished Public Lecture Series with a lecture by Dr. Tristan Stubbs.  For his lecture Stubbs presented part of his research on the plantation overseers of eighteenth-century Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina.  He described how the nineteenth-century view of overseers as capricious and brutal men can be traced back to the eighteenth century.  Stubbs noted that attitudes towards overseers had not always been so harsh, and he argued that the idea of overseers as both brutal and often incompetent arose in the eighteenth century due to a number of factors, including a rising absenteeism among plantation owners and strains of Enlightenment thought.  Stubbs, who received his PhD from Pembroke College, Cambridge, is quite the expert on the overseers of the eighteenth century, his manuscript on the subject having won the 2013 Hines Prize.  The lecture had the honor of being attended by Dr. Sam Hines, who led the creation of the CLAW program and is the man behind the Hines Prize, named after Dr. Hines’ mother.  Right before the lecture Dr. Hines presented Dr. Stubbs with a certificate confirming him as the 2013 Hines Prize winner. The Wells Fargo Distinguished Public Lecture series will continue on November 6th at 6 pm with a lecture given in the College of Charleston’s Jewish Studies Center by Dr. Ras Michael Brown, a professor from Southern Illinois University.

Hines Prize-Winner Coming to the College of Charleston!

Dr. Tristan Stubbs, winner of the 2013 Hines Prize, will visit the College of Charleston at the end of October. While here he will lead a faculty seminar as well as a public presentation on plantation overseers. For more details on the October 30th presentation see the flyer below.

 

Stubbs Wells Fargo Lecture flyer

Hines Prize Awarded

We are pleased to announce that the 2013 Hines Prize for the best first book on South Carolina or the Atlantic World has been awarded to Dr. Tristan Stubbs for his work, The Plantation Overseers of Eighteenth-Century Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia.  Dr. Stubbs recently completed a PhD in American History at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, UK. Formerly, he lectured in American and Caribbean studies at the University of Sussex. He has been Gilder Lehrman Fellow at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Virginia Historical Society, and Lewis P. Jones Visiting Fellow at the University of South Carolina. His writing on historical and contemporary slavery, the history of ideas, agricultural history, the Atlantic slave trade, and gender history has appeared in journals, magazines, encyclopedias and online.

The study focuses on plantation overseers in eighteenth-century Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia, subjects long-neglected in the historiography of American slavery. These men were the arbiters of violent punishment for many thousands of bondpeople. They represented not only the cruel régime imposed by slaveholders, but also the vicious authority of slave societies that designated the oversight system the first line of defence against enslaved resistance. Although violence was practised and encouraged by plantation owners in the early years of the eighteenth century, the latter decades witnessed a shift in their attitudes. By late century, planters lambasted overseers for their intrinsic violence, their passionate tempers, and their universal barbarity towards slaves.

In his acceptance of the prize, Dr. Stubbs wrote, “My principal aim was to uncover the reasons for the widespread vilification of overseers by the end of the 1700s. In addition to their reputation for violence, plantation overseers were also believed to be untrustworthy employees, morally dissolute supervisors, and incompetent agriculturists. I argue that these shifts in opinion grew out of far-reaching ideological and structural transformations to American slave societies during the Revolutionary era, not least the need to justify the survival of slavery in an ostensibly free republic.”

AWARD: Submit dissertation/manuscript by June 15 for CLAW’s 2013 Hines Prize

The Hines Prize is awarded to the best first book relating to any aspect of the
Carolina Lowcountry and/or the Atlantic World. The prize carries a cash award of $1,000 and preferential consideration by the University of South Carolina Press for the CLAW Program’s book series.

EXTENDED DEADLINE: June 15, 2013

Send all submissions and inquiries to: Dr. Simon Lewis, lewiss@cofc.edu

 

Hines Prize, 2013

Hines Prize, 2013: Do you have a manuscript in hand or in preparation that would fit the scope of the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World (CLAW) book series. Do you know others who do? If your manuscript is for a first book, you should consider entering it for the sixth biennial award of the Hines Prize, given to the best first book relating to any aspect of the Carolina Lowcountry and/or the Atlantic World. The prize carries a cash award of $1,000 and preferential consideration by the University of South Carolina Press for the CLAW Program’s book series.

Previous winners of the Hines Prize are as follows:

2003—This Remote Part of the World: Regional Formation in Lower Cape Fear, North Carolina, 1725-1775—Bradford Wood
2005—Votaries of Apollo: The St. Cecilia Society and the Patronage of Concert Music in Charleston, South Carolina, 1766-1820—Nicholas Michael Butler
2007—Fighting for Honor: The History of African Martial Art Traditions in the Atlantic World—T.J. Desch-Obi
2009—Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic World: A Social and Architectural History—Barry Stiefel — 2011 — Michael D. Thompson — Working on the Dock of the Bay:  Labor and Life Along Charleston’s Waterfront, 1783-1861.

For a full listing of the books in the USC Press’s series in the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World, seehttp://www.sc.edu/uscpress/claw.html.

Deadline for submission: May 15st, 2013

Please send your complete manuscript, either in hard-copy to: Professor Simon Lewis, Associate Director, CLAW Program, Department of English, College of Charleston, 66 George Street, Charleston, SC 29424-0001;
or in electronic format to Dr Lewis at lewiss@cofc.edu.

For further information, please contact Professor Lewis at lewiss@cofc.edu

Hines Prize Fifth Biennial Competition

Do you have a manuscript in hand or in preparation that would fit the scope of the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World (CLAW) book series. Do you know others who do? If your manuscript is for a first book, you should consider entering it for the fifth biennial award of the Hines Prize, given to the best first book relating to any aspect of the Carolina Lowcountry and/or the Atlantic World. The prize carries a cash award of $1,000 and preferential consideration by the University of South Carolina Press for the CLAW Program’s book series.

Previous winners of the Hines Prize are as follows:

2003—This Remote Part of the World: Regional Formation in Lower Cape Fear, North Carolina, 1725-1775—Bradford Wood
2005—Votaries of Apollo: The St. Cecilia Society and the Patronage of Concert Music in Charleston, South Carolina, 1766-1820—Nicholas Michael Butler
2007—Fighting for Honor: The History of African Martial Art Traditions in the Atlantic World—T.J. Desch-Obi
2009—Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic World: A Social and Architectural History—Barry Stiefel

For a full listing of the books in the USC Press’s series in the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World, see http://www.sc.edu/uscpress/claw.html.

Deadline for submission: May 1st, 2011

Please send your complete manuscript, either in hard-copy to: Professor Simon Lewis, Associate Director, CLAW Program, Department of English, College of Charleston, 66 George Street, Charleston, SC 29424-0001;
or in electronic format to Dr Lewis at lewiss@cofc.edu.

For further information, please contact Professor Lewis at lewiss@cofc.edu