Trevor Burnard obituary

The horrors of plantation slavery are a ubiquitous presence in contemporary retellings of the past, as portrayed in film or taught in schools and universities; a feature of our vivid but sometimes too simplistic understanding of empire and its evils.

Trevor Burnard, a historian of the Caribbean and early America who has died from cancer aged 63, did more than most to reveal the specifics of the callous and sordid nature of the relationships between planters and enslaved people, in particular in his best known book, Mastery, Tyranny & Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (2004).

Trevor used the 10,000 pages of Thistlewood’s diary to create a revealing – and horrifying – microhistory of the sheer brutality of slavery in Jamaica, and of the casual physical and sexual violence that was the experience of untold numbers of enslaved Jamaicans.

His study of Thistlewood is no caricature. It explores with nuance the power dynamics that gave enslaved people the means of “opposition” to their enslavers – Trevor was wary of overusing the term “resistance”.

Thistlewood, for example, coerced many of his female slaves into sex, but Trevor’s account also details at least 10 occasions on which Phibbah, the enslaved woman with whom Thistlewood had the most sustained relationship, was able to turn down his sexual demands.

In other contexts, too, Trevor was interested in the ways in which – borrowing EP Thompson’s phrase – the moral economy of slavery could provide (very limited) ways for the enslaved to push back against enslavers who violated their expectations on such matters as overwork, excessive and unprovoked violence, or inadequate care for the sick.

His work linked Atlantic plantation slavery to early capitalism and to global economic systems, but Trevor also found innovative ways of finding the voices of the enslaved themselves within the archives compiled by their masters or by imperial authorities, notably in his Hearing Slave Voices: Slave Testimony from Berbice (2010). History, for Trevor, had to be rooted in the primary sources. Without first-hand acquaintance with the evidence, no real understanding or sound judgment was possible.

He was an exemplary historian with a mastery of archival research, which he used in teaching students in universities in the Caribbean, New Zealand and the UK, as well as in his 14 books (with more in press) and more than 50 articles and a similar number of essays in books.

From 2019 he was Wilberforce professor of the history of slavery and emancipation at the University of Hull, also serving as director of the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation in the city. He brought to the role his extensive international networks, his generous support for other scholars, and his project leadership, including involving the Wilberforce Institute in exploring the historical slavery links of the founders of the Guardian, which has led to an apology by its current owner, the Scott Trust, and a programme of restorative justice totalling more than £10m through the next decade.

Born in Dunedin, New Zealand, Trevor was the son of Dorothy (nee Milne) and Ray Burnard. Ray was initially a fruit and vegetable wholesaler, until he and Dorothy bought and ran a motel in Invercargill, where Trevor went to school. He then went to the University of Otago, initially to study law before switching to history. A PhD at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, followed, completed in 1989, and later published as Creole Gentlemen: The Maryland Elite, 1691-1776 (2002).

Trevor’s first academic post was as a lecturer in history at the University of the West Indies (1987-89), where he “did the archival work on early Jamaica that … sustained me for my entire career to date”.

Returning to New Zealand he spent a year at the University of Waikato, then joined the history department at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch in 1990, laying down there the foundations for his Thistlewood book.

In 2000 he came to the UK for the first time to take up a readership in early American history at Brunel University, and began there a long succession of academic leadership and management roles. He was appointed professor of American history at the University of Sussex in 2004, moving to University of Warwick after three years to become professor in the history of the Americas.

In 2011 he took up the role of professor and head of school at the University of Melbourne, but was happy to return to the UK to take up his roles as Wilberforce professor at Hull and director of the Wilberforce Institute.

A historian through and through, Trevor well understood the poisonous legacy of slavery and the slave trade, but would not allow its horror to deflect him from the historian’s task of understanding.

Working in a field that fuels many contemporary ideological battles, he refused to be pigeon-holed. He was plain-spoken, respecting few shibboleths of left or right. He pulled no punches; in his teaching, he issued no trigger warnings, even while asking his students to study episodes of appalling inhumanity. Learning to look reality in the eye was, to his mind, what education was all about.

His most recent work focused on empire, both the imperial context of early American history and the centrality of empire to the global history of slavery. His latest book, Writing the History of Global Slavery (2023), argued that slavery in antebellum America should not be seen as the default model for all slavery. The historical systems of slavery that were central to empires were mostly very different.

Trevor had a remarkable talent for friendship – we were close friends for more than 30 years since we first worked together in Christchurch – and his kindness and support for colleagues and students was much admired.

He – along with his wife, Deborah Morgan, a librarian, whom he married in 1991 – built a global network of collaborators and friends.

Deborah survives him, as do his children, Nicholas and Eleanor, his mother, Dorothy, and his brothers, Murray and Russell.

• Trevor Graeme Burnard, historian, born 15 October 1960; died 19 July 2024