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Dr Sarah Barber
Senior Lecturer
Department: History
Current Teaching
Research Interests
Disputatious Societies: The British Caribbean, c.1600-1720
Thousands of digital images and digitalised copies of primary sources - material and archival - relating to early British and African settlement in the Caribbean region in the seventeenth century have been collected and centralised at Lancaster University. They relate to the establishment of a British presence in the region known as the Torrid Zone,which covered, amongst others, the larger settlements of Carolina, Barbados, Jamaica, the Leeward Islands and Surinam. Centralising this material enables comparative studies in settlement. It also allows for the study of secondary migration - that is from one settlement to another, rather than primary migration from Britain, Ireland or, Africa - and offers many opportunities for doctoral and post-doctoral study on the early Americas, colonialism, or the basic bonds of human society. (Further information about financial support for postgraduate students at Lancaster is available under Funding for Postgraduate Studies.) For undergraduates, this material is available to students through a special subject option, Hist363. This research has fostered a number of successful research bids, with others in the pipeline, including the first full-scale monograph study of the region, Disputatious Authorities: New Perspectives on the Torrid Zone, and a digitisation and analysis project scheduled (ESRC). There is a blog concerned with the process of conceptualising and writing Disputatious Authorities, on which comments would be very welcome: please go to http://seb-book-blog.blogspot.com/. Webpages about the research, the documents and archives consulted, research findings and publications, and essays about more general matters personal and Caribbean can be found at http://lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/caribbean/index.htm.
English Folk
Synthesising previous strands of work on radicalism and national identity, this research comes in two halves: the first seeks to identify what is meant by folk culture (in an English context), as distinct from popular culture, and employs a trans-disciplinary approach to arrive at a working definition as valid for the present as for various periods of the past. This interpretation is applied to four centuries of English history - the early seventeenth century to the present - to refresh and recast the traditional narrative. To further the first part, I am currently collecting oral testimony from current practitioners of folk culture - artists, musicians, craftspeople - who reflect on their relationship with the community and with the past. Further information about this research project can be found at http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/english_folk/EFS/index.html.
Identity and Prejudice in Early-Modern Europe
Furthering my interest in the fundamental bonds of human interaction, this research compares three areas of early-modern Europe which could be said to operate at the fringes of European norms and what constituted 'civilisation': at the western edge, the islands of Britain and Ireland; at the northern fringes, the Swedish kingdom; and to the south, Spain, bordering the African continent. In each of these areas, the period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries marked the rise and consolidation of dominant norms - English, Castilian and Swedish - at the expense of marginalised communities and cultures: Irish, Morisco and Saami/Finnish. This then, is a study of the process of marginalisation, prejudice, assimilation and expulsion. Part of the project was represented in a British Academy funded project, 'Ethnicity and Prejudice in the pre-modern world', co-ordinated with Andrew Jotischky (Lancaster). In 2011 it will be continued with a paper first delivered to the RHS Edges of Europe symposium, and subsequently in a written article, which explores the Morisco communities in the Ebro valley region of the kingdom of Aragon. This paper will soon be available through this webapge.
The Method of History
Work in all three of the above areas involves sources from material, visual, aural and oral culture which prove problematic for Historians. Corinna Peniston Bird (Lancaster) and I have co-edited the volume, History Beyond the Text (Routledge, 2009), which brings together individual experts from Europe and the Americas on the use which historians can make of sources such as art, music, oral testimony, the internet, material culture, landscape and so on. The English Folk and English Caribbean projects both include major collections of digital photographs, English Folk includes a study of art and music and employs oral testimony, and I have a particular scholarly interest at present in the very different work of Joseph Wright of Derby and Juan Sanchez Cotán. The graphic art of the seventeenth-century woodcut is represented in an article on four centuries of (mis)useof a particular image, initiated by the presses of Jane and Andrew Coe. This features in vol.70 (2010) of History Workshop Journal, and further information about the Coe press and a database listing of its output can be viewed at www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/coe/index.html.
Select Publications
Books
- Disputatious Authorities: New Perspectives on the Torrid Zone (I am on partial teaching release between February and December 2011 to secure the manuscript of this monograph).
- A Revolutionary Rogue: Henry Marten and the English Republic (Stroud: Sutton, 2000).
- Regicide and Republicanism: Politics and Ethics in the English Revolution, 1646-1659 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998).
Edited Collections
- With Corinna Peniston-Bird, History Beyond the Text: A Guide to the Use of Non-Traditional Sources by Historians (London: Routledge, 2009).
- With Steven G. Ellis, Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State, 1485-1725 (London: Longman, 1995).
- With Myrtle Hill, Aspects of Irish Studies (Belfast, 1990).
Recent Articles and Chapters in Books
- 'Who owns knowledge? Heritage, intellectual property and access in and to the 17th-century Caribbean', Archival Science (July 2011);
- 'Digitisation and the survival of documents: the records of seventeenth-century Barbados', Appositions (July 2011);
- 'Curiosity and Reality: the context and interpretation of a seventeenth-century image', History Workshop Journal vol.70 (2010), pp.21-46.
- '"Not worth one Groat": The status, gentility and credit of Lawrence and Sarah Crabb of Antigua', Journal of early American History (JEAH), Volume 1, Number 1, 2011, pp.26-61;
- '"Let him be an Englishman". Irish and Scottish ministers in the Caribbean Church of England, 1610-1730', in Douglas Hamilton and Allan I. Macinnes (eds.), Mobility and Identity from Jacobitism to Empire, 1680-1820 (forthcoming, 2012);
- 'History', in Sophie Krossa (ed.), Europe in a Global Context (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), chapter 2, pp.25-37;
- 'Art: the Visual Image, in Corinna Peniston-Bird and Sarah Barber (eds), History Beyond the Text: A Guide to the Use of Non-Traditional Sources by Historians (London: Routledge, 2009), pp.15-31.
- (with Corinna Peniston Bird), 'Introduction', in History beyond the Text, pp.1-14.
- 'Power in the English Caribbean: The Proprietorship of Lord Willoughby of Parham', in Louis H. Roper and Bertrand van Ruymbeke (eds), Constructing early-modern Empires: Proprietary Ventures in the Atlantic World, 1500-1750, Atlantic History Series (Leiden: Brill, 2007).
- 'Settlement, Transplantation and Expulsion: A Comparative Study of the Placement of Peoples', in Ciarán Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds), Power and Argument in Early-Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
- 'Antithesis: How to Create a Nation', in Helen Brocklehurst and Robert Philips (eds.), British Island Stories (London: Macmillan Palgrave, 2004).
- 'The Formation of Cultural Attitudes: The Example of the Three Kingdoms', in Allan I. Macinnes and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), The Stuart Kingdoms in the Seventeenth Century (Dublin: Four Courts' Press, 2002), pp. 169-85.
- Belshazzar's Feast: Regicide, Republicanism and the Metaphor of Balance, in Jason Peacey (ed.), Cruel Necessity: The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I, 1649 (London: Macmillan Publishing, 2001), pp. 94-116.
- '"Nothing but the first chaos": Making Sense of Ireland', The Seventeenth Century (1999), 24-42.
- 'Attitudes towards the Scots in Northern England, 1639-1652: "the lamb and the dragon cannot be reconciled"', Northern History, 35 (1999), 93-118.
- '"A Bastard Kind of Militia": Localism and Tactics during the Second Civil War', in Ian Gentles, John Morrill and Blair Worden (eds.), Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen in the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 133-50.
- 'Charles I: Regicide and Republicanism', History Today, 46 (1996), 29-34.
- 'Scotland and Ireland under the Commonwealth: A Question of Loyalty', in Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber, Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State, 1485-1725 (London: Longman, 1995), pp.195-211.
- 'A State of Britishness?', in Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber, Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State, 1485-1725 (London: Longman, 1995), pp.306-311.
- 'Irish Undercurrents to the Politics of April 1653', Historical Research, 65 (1992), 315-35.
- 'The Engagement for the Council of State and the Establishment of the Commonwealth Government', Historical Research, 63 (1990), 44-57.
- 'Irish Migrant Agricultural Labourers in Nineteenth-Century Lincolnshire', Saothar: the Journal of Irish Labour History, 17 (1983), 17-32.
Publications Forthcoming
- 'Marriage, companionship and male and female society within the circle of Joseph Wright of Derby'.
- 'What is Englishness? A Definition of English Folk Identity from 1600'.
- British Academy Records of Economic and Social History series, 2 vols.; edited documents and introduction:
- vol. 1: The British Caribbean in the 17th century;
- vol. 2: The Barbados Deeds in the17th century.
- Disputing Authorities: Re-writing the Caribbean.
- 'Fortune's frowns and the finger ofGod:deciphering fear in the Caribbean', in Lauric Henneton (ed.), Fear and the Construction of the Atlantic World;
Potential Doctoral Proposals
Dr Barber is keen to hear from students interested inworking on topics that would fall under the following headings:
- The British Isles, especially England and Ireland, in the seventeenth century.
- Seventeenth-Century English Radicalism and Republicanism.
- Ethnic Minorities in Early-Modern Europe.
- The Caribbean in the seventeenth Century.
Eprints Publications Repository and Bibliographic Database
Sarah Barber has 7 selected publication records listed on this webpage. Use links to access abstracts and full text where available. View all records to sort by date, type and title. For all ePrints records go to http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk
Associated Keywords: Access to archives, Anarchism, Antigua, Architecture, Archives, Art, Art history, Barbados, Barbarians, Baroque culture, Baroque literature, Britain, Caribbean, Carolina, Colonialism, Colonisation, Conquest and colonization, Culture, Diaspora, Early modern, Early modern culture, Early modern England, Early modern Scotland, Early modern writing, Early Quakers, Eighteenth century, England, Englishness, Finland, Folk, History, Identity, Ireland, Irish history, Jamaica, Jamestown, Joint-stock companies, Material culture, Migration, Moriscos, Music, Nation, Oral testimony, Political philosophy, Political theory, Radicalism, Republicanism, Scandinavian history, Seventeenth century, Spanish history, Surinam, Sweden, Utopianism, West Indies
View all research activities, ePrints, news and events associated with Sarah Barber.
Contact Details
Tel: (5)92650
Room: Furness, C44
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Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Lancaster University
Lancaster LA1 4YD
United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0) 1524 510851
Fax: +44 (0) 1524 510857
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