Jesse Cromwell
Associate Professor of Colonial Latin American History and Undergraduate Program Coordinator
Dr. Jesse Cromwell is an Associate Professor of Colonial Latin American History in the Department of History at the University of Mississippi.
Research Interests
Dr. Jesse Cromwell's research interests include Latin American History, Atlantic History, Caribbean History, Comparative Empires, Maritime Commerce, Piracy and Smuggling, Transatlantic Migration, Alcohol in the Caribbean.
Biography
Dr. Cromwell’s research and teaching interests encompass colonial Latin American history as well as the histories of the Caribbean, and the Atlantic world. He has been fascinated throughout his career by the contradictions between political and human geographies. In general, he focuses on how mobile individuals adjacent to the massive plantation complexes of the Atlantic world knit together imperial and inter-imperial economies, communication and settlement networks, and even foodways within the reorganizational framework of the Bourbon Reforms.
Dr. Cromwell’s first book, The Smugglers’ World: Illicit Trade and Atlantic Communities in Eighteenth-Century Venezuela (Omohundro Institute/UNC Press, 2018) investigates eighteenth-century illicit commerce in Venezuela between Spanish, Dutch, English, and French subjects as a practice that produced alternate colonial social norms and conflicting notions of imperial development. The book won the 2019 RMCLAS Bandelier-Lavrín Prize for best book in colonial Latin American history and was honorable mention for the CLAH Bolton-Johnson Prize and the Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association’s Murdo MacLeod Prize.
He is currently at work on two projects. The first is a study focusing on the migration of families from the Canary Islands to the Spanish circum-Caribbean in the latter half of the eighteenth century. As Crown-supported colonizers, they took up residence in territories such as Venezuela, Cuba, Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, Louisiana, Texas, and Florida. Records of this mobile, transatlantic population underscore the limits of militarization, social and economic reform, and socioracial perception in Bourbon Spanish America and the Atlantic World. The second project is a broad history of alcohol and cultures of drinking in the Spanish Caribbean.
Publications
Courses Taught
- HST 160 Introduction to Latin American History
- HST 360 Colonial Latin America, 1450-1820
- HST 363 History of the Caribbean
- HST 364 Independence of Latin America, 1760-1830
- HST 498 Pirates of the Early Modern Caribbean
- HST 499 The World of the Ship: Maritime History in the Age of Sail
- HST 661 Europe & the Atlantic World
Education
Ph.D. History, University of Texas at Austin (2012)