The USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute American Origins Seminar meets with Eric Herschthal, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Utah, on December 7. Professor Herschthal is a historian of slavery and abolition in the United States and the wider Atlantic World. His American Origins seminar paper is titled "Carbon Conscripts: Slavery and the Origins of Climate Change." Slave plantations in the colonial British Atlantic dramatically increased carbon emissions of the British empire in early modern period. Yet the rice plantations of the Carolina low country were an anomaly, collectively emitting less carbon than even the family-based wheat farms of the mid-Atlantic colonies. This paper compares the carbon emissions of slave-grown rice to other slave- and non-slave grown commodities in the colonial British Atlantic and argues that rice’s strikingly small carbon footprint can be attributed to several intertwined factors, including the low country’s unique grasslands environment, enslaved resistance, African-derived agricultural knowledge, rice plantations’ high capital requirements, and shifts in global grain markets.

RSVP by November 30 to receive the pre-circulated reading. All EMSI events are free and open to the public.