Jonathan Connolly

Position
Year
Role
Postdoctoral Research Associate, Princeton University
Title
"Worthy of Freedom: Antislavery, Free Labor, and Indenture in the Era of Emancipation"
Bio/Description

Jonathan Connolly received his PhD in History from Stanford University, as well as his JD from Stanford Law School, in 2017. Before coming to Princeton, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard. His research interests include antislavery, emancipation, and empire, and histories of race, law, labor, and freedom. His current project considers the normalization of Indian indentured labor migration after the abolition of slavery in the British empire. It argues, broadly, that new ideas about race and political economy reshaped the category of free labor around the middle of the nineteenth century. Linking ideological and structural change, it also explains how local and global economic dynamics helped legitimize indenture as a form of “free labor.” Connolly’s article, “Indentured Labour Migration and the Meaning of Emancipation,” was recently published in Past and Present, 238, no. 1 (2018): 85-119.