Thiago Nascimento Krause is a 2025 Eccles Institute Visiting Fellow based at Wayne State University.

Black and white picture of Add. Mss. 14,037, fl. 10, 14 August 1645: an English plan to export enslaved people from Madagascar to Bahia de Todos os Santos, then the Brazilian colonial capital.

Why is time at the British Library indispensable for a historian tracing colonial Brazil’s entanglements with the wider world? English commercial and imperial expansion from the late sixteenth century tied Britain to much of the globe, including regions where it had neither a permanent presence nor direct trade.

Like many national libraries, but on a far larger scale given its age, resources, and location, the British Library has accrued tens of thousands of disparate documents from around the world through donations and acquisitions. The result is a collection that rewards specialists in almost any period, place, or topic.

Before receiving an Eccles Visiting Fellowship, I had spent only one day at the Library, but I arrived with extensive notes from trawling the catalogue before the late-2023 cyberattack. I also combed through older catalogues—most now digitized—both general listings and those focused on Portuguese and Brazilian materials. The footnotes of earlier historians supplied further trails to follow.

I have consulted roughly a hundred early modern manuscript volumes, each with hundreds of folios, so it is impossible to offer a full panorama of the riches held in the Library’s vaults. As one would expect, private papers of English statesmen abound, and the files of diplomats in Lisbon are especially valuable as complements to State Papers 89 (Portugal) at The National Archives, Kew. They track Brazilian trade and English attempts to enter it, as in Francis Parry’s report of 14/24 May 1678 (Add. MS 34,333, f. 59), and Lord Tyrawly’s letter of 17 November 1738 seeking authorization for the Royal African Company to supply enslaved Africans to Brazil in hopes of reviving the company’s fortunes (Add. MS 23,629, ff. 11–11v).

There are also manifold collections of assorted public and private papers, gathered for reasons now obscure yet often invaluable to historians. Some relating to the English Caribbean matter to Brazilianists. Mid-seventeenth-century planters from Barbados complained about Brazilian competition (Add. MS 14,111, ff. 9–10v), revealing the interconnected nature of Atlantic markets. Seventy years later, Jamaican planters and merchants petitioned for a tax break because the price of enslaved Africans had risen with heightened Brazilian demand (Add. MS 22,676, ff. 75–76), showing that the competition now happened in another, even grimmer sphere.

British acquisitiveness appears as well in volumes of Iberian documents, both state and private. A few volumes from the library of the fiercely anti-British Portuguese statesman the Marquis of Pombal seem to have found their way into the collection, such as Egerton MS 529, which contains valuable data on Portuguese trade in the mid-eighteenth century. Pombal would have been disgusted; this historian is grateful and urges other Iberian historians to further explore the wonders of the British Library.

The British Library's collections demonstrate how global historical research often requires looking beyond obvious geographical boundaries. For historians of colonial Brazil, London offers an indispensable complement to traditional Portuguese and Brazilian archives, revealing the global networks that shaped Brazil's colonial experience. My fellowship confirmed that understanding Brazil's past requires examining it through multiple imperial and commercial lenses—many of which are preserved in the British Library's remarkable collections.

Slavery is a steady, often silent presence in many of these papers. The mass enslavement of Africans and Indigenous peoples to produce sugar and tobacco, and to mine gold and diamonds, made Brazil valuable. The enslaved themselves are largely voiceless in sources centered on trade and diplomacy. To hear them, the historian must look elsewhere.

Professor Bryce Evans is a 2025 Eccles Institute Visiting Fellow based at Liverpool Hope University.

Daisy Reck, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1939)

My principal research interest is the global history of food, and much of my research has focused on the Americas and the Americanisation of food in the twentieth century. I have pursued this theme through the lens of airline food¹ and – more specifically to a Caribbean context - how US public health and environmental policies relating to food developed in its empire in the first half of the twentieth century.²

The expanding US early-century presence in territories such as Panama, Phillipines, Puerto Rico and Hawaii has come under pronounced academic scrutiny in recent years, encapsulated in Daniel Immerwahr’s provocatively titled How to Hide an Empire.³ More recently, and more broadly, Tao Leigh Goffe’s Dark Laboratory argues that these processes turned the Caribbean into a “dark laboratory of colonial desires and experiments” and laid the foundation for the current climate crisis.⁴

In undertaking my Eccles Visiting Fellowship, my central research question concerned how US scientific understanding dovetailing environment, public health, and food played out in its imperial periphery in the early twentieth century. For example, in Panama, US-wrought environmental transformation through the world’s largest man-made reservoir, Gatun Lake, would become a brand new space for US Government ecologists and agronomists to control: in the words of Megan Raby, a “little world in itself” or, more insidiously, a “test tube republic”.⁵

The Eccles Visiting Fellowship enabled me ready access to contemporary official and semi-official publications, books and periodicals outlining similar processes in the Phillipines, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii circa 1910-1940.

When it came to food and local environment, the US presence brought, on the one hand, progress but, on the other, prejudice.

On the one hand, better scientific understanding of the link between environment and food led to progressive public health measures regulating the consumption and preservation of food in the nascent empire. US scientists, civil servants and military personnel brought with them advanced nutritional understanding and technologies such as refrigeration, as well as measures to combat disease.⁶ As US Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace contended in a 1934 pamphlet, “science has given us control over nature far beyond the wildest imaginings of our grandfathers”.⁷ Such horticultural experimentation and innovation would culminate in the hybridisation of seed corn and the dawn of the so-called ‘Green Revolution’ of disease-resistant crops. In the longer-term, US presence led to the growth of hyphenated (fusion) cuisines such as Filipino-American food, the roots of which were observed in the early twentieth century by American visitors.⁸     

On the other hand, these transitions were marked by the racial ordering of food and the use of food science as an instrument of soft power, with the expanding US imperium controlling the environment in its newly acquired territories to the detriment of native peoples.

A good example of this process is to be found in Daisy Reck’s 1932 travelogue on Puerto Rico, which typifies white saviour narratives where grateful natives look to the United States as “a great and enlightened nation”. The various US organisations impacting the food system were lauded. US capitalists were praised for modernising sugar production by introducing the factory system; American Presbyterians running dormitory schools and institutes had brought with them (thank Goodness) “American style food”; and the Federal Reconstruction Administration had put the locals to work on large market gardening projects to wean them off their traditional diet of rice and beans (see image below). All observed from afar by Reck - coffee and cigarette in hand - and all, unquestioningly, in the name of progress.⁹

In places such as Hawaii, nutritious local food cultures were shunned in favour of the high-fat, high-sodium SPAM. While food trends like SPAM tend to be trivialised today, contemporary publications make clear that the coming of SPAM to Hawaii was symbolic of the intersected penetration of US military and capital – notably the sugar and pineapple industries – at a time when war with Japan loomed.¹⁰

In the early US empire, food and diet was conceived in specifically racial terms.¹¹ The situation in Hawaii echoed experiences in other parts of the Caribbean, where measures to coerce migrant workers into greater productivity led to the militarised enforcement of a ‘white’ diet high in protein and low in carbohydrates.¹² In summary, in these little worlds of food control, racist assumptions underpinned narratives of progress.

The British Library’s collections contain much food-related material (collated in a guide by Ruby Tandoh and introduced by Polly Russell) and the Library’s Food Season is ever-popular.¹³ My Eccles fellowship enabled me to explore further the racialised ordering of food in the Caribbean in the early twentieth century: a topic which resonates with broader food themes accessible at the Library.

References

1. Bryce Evans, Food and Aviation in the Twentieth Century: the Pan American Ideal (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).

2. 'Bryce Evans, “They have undertaken to regulate our palate”: Racism and the Spatial Authoritarianism of Food Consumption during the construction of the Panama Canal, 1904-1914', Journal of Caribbean History 58:2 (December 2024).
3. Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States (New York: Penguin, 2019).
4. Tao Leigh Goffe, Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis (New York: Penguin, 2025).

5. Megan Raby, American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

6. J.R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: ecology and war in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (Cambridge: CUP, 2010).

7. Henry A. Wallace, America Must Choose (New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1934).

8. George A. Malcolm, The Commonwealth of the Phillipines (New York: Appleton-Century, 1936).

9. Daisy Reck, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1939).

10. Joseph Barber, Hawaii: Our Restless Rampart (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1941).

11. See, for example, H.L. Shapiro’s Migration and Environment: a study of the physical characteristics of the Japanese immigrants to Hawaii and the effects of environment on their descendants (Oxford: OUP, 1939) in which body measurements and physical characteristics across generations are extrapolated against occupational status on plantation and farms.

12. John Stephens, A Sketch of the Panama Canal: its past, present and possible future (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1908); Walter Stevens, A Trip to Panama (St Louis: Lesan-Gould, 1907).

13. Ruby Tandoh, Guide to English language food collections (London: British Library, 2025).

 

We are delighted to share the programme for this year's Summer Scholars! This annual season of lunchtime talks explores the exciting and wide-ranging research into the British Library’s Americas collections by Eccles Institute Fellows and associates, as well as Library staff.  

Talks are free of charge and take place in the Library's Knowledge Centre from 12.30 - 13.30 on select days throughout the summer; no need to book, just drop in!

Look forward to seeing you there, the programme is below and attached.

Thursday 3 July  

Golden Harvest: ‘Home’ in the Imagination of the Immigrant: Zeus Sumra reflects on the ways in which the work of Trinidad-born textile designer Althea McNish inspired his novella. 

A Reading of the Story Groom of the Stool, Set in Trinidad: Nicole-Rachelle Moore reads a story inspired by a recollection of her paternal grandmother and embedded in Trinidad and Tobago's history. 

Thursday 10 July 

A Place Called Home: Community Curriculum in Rural Jamaica: Shereca McGowan-Hunter explores the concept of community curriculum within a remote rural community in St. Andrew, Jamaica.  

Public and Digital Diplomacy in Regional Organisations: The Case of CARICOM: Andel Andrew reflects on the evolving landscape of public and digital diplomacy, particularly within the context of regional organisations like The Caribbean Community (CARICOM). 

Thursday 17 July 

Writing Speculative Historical Fiction: Wild Women of the Northwest: Inés G. Labarta discusses the creative process behind her latest novel-in-progress, an alternative version of Spain's colonial past set in an island-continent in the North Atlantic. 

Speculating and Reimagining Slavery: A Creative Exploration of the Long Papers: Cherelle Findley explores how creative writers can use speculative fiction to reflect on the legacies of transatlantic enslavement.  

Thursday 24 July: bonus session (not included in pamphlet) 

Anglophone Caribbean Writers at Cuba's Casa de las Américas: Emily Taylor reflects on the important decolonial space offered by Cuba's Institute de las Américas to midcentury Caribbean writers including George Lamming and Andrew Salkey.

British Archives and Caribbean Plantations: Journeys through Enslavement and Freedom: Using 18th-century documents, archaeological field sites, and critical fabulation, Edith Gonzalez chases individual stories across oceans and islands.

Tuesday 29 July 

Deerskins, Trade and Cotton, 1760s - 1830s:Artist Melinda Schwakhofer shares her journey of discovery and re-connection to her Indigenous Muscogee Nation and its history and culture through her textile art practice, including quilting, stitching and tanning deerskin. 

Yuma: Portraits from a Cuban Journey: Photographer James Clifford Kent reflects on two decades of photographing the people and places of Cuba - how trust is built, stories unfold, and images take on meaning beyond the frame. 

Tuesday 5 August 

‘Another wedding ain’t gon’ happen here’: Resisting Marriage Tourism at Plantations: Laura Wilson explores contemporary Black authored texts that write back against slavery and the plantation from a present-day setting. 

Sound Recordings from the Americas: Michele Banal presents a selection of Americas-originating recordings drawn from the British Library’s Sound Archive and shares the stories and contexts behind them.  

Thursday 14 August 

The Atheist Pamphlet and the American Public Sphere: Florian Zappe discusses the circulation and impact of atheist pamphlet literature within the American public sphere and how such texts engage with and challenge dominant cultural norms. 

Postal Pride: A History of the Gay and Lesbian History on Stamps Club, 1982-2012: Richard Scott Morel explores how the Gay and Lesbian History on Stamps Club enabled people to create knowledge, meaning, identity, community and worldviews, during a pivotal period for LGBTQ+ rights in the USA.  

Tuesday 19 August 

The U.S. Supreme Court and the Working of American Democracy: The U.S. Supreme Court has often become the focus of debates about the present and future of democracy; Emma Long considers whether history is currently repeating itself. 

‘Liberty in North America Triumphant’: A Triumphal Arch in Yorkshire: Alex Lock explores why, shortly after the American Revolution, a Whig politician erected an arch in Yorkshire dedicated to ‘Liberty in North America’, and its impact on Anglo-American relations? 

Thursday 21 August 

Mapping Women: Pragya Agarwal reflects on the challenges of looking for unnamed and hidden women mapmakers in the archives and the way she learnt to listen to the silences for her latest book. 

Development, Planning and Knowledge in Venezuela’s Guayana Project: Gianfranco Selgas explores how planners rendered Guayana both a material and symbolic object of knowledge through infrastructure, maps, reports and images. 

Tuesday 26 August  

Manumission and Morality in Eighteenth-century Barbados: Looking at sentiments expressed around manumission by some of Barbados’s richest planters, Philip Abraham considers how we might historicise moral thinking about slavery, and what this means for discussions of slavery's legacies today. 

The British Library’s Collection of US Underground Comix and Related Ephemera: Reed Puc, a British Library PhD Placement Student, reflects on their investigation into the Library’s rich collection of US underground comix and related ephemera, including collection items of note. 

Thurs 28 August 

‘Jiggs Bennett' and the Reporter Protagonist in Mid 20th-century Black Periodicals: Amber Kirwan discusses the 'reporter protagonist' in the short stories of James H Hill, a prolific feature writer for the Baltimore Afro-American. 

'Boiling Frogs': Using Sound and Performance in Climate Change Research: Reflecting on climate change and the apologue of the boiling frog, Sebas Hau turns to decolonised listening practices and Americas-originating sound and music collections in the British Library.  

For more information about the Eccles Institute and our collections, contact [email protected].