Interview with Dr. Dexnell Peters
By Kamma Ofelia Strøm.
Dr. Dexnell Peters is a Lecturer in Caribbean and Atlantic History at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus. He has previously been a Teaching Fellow at the University of Warwick and the Bennett Boskey Fellow in Atlantic History at Exeter College, University of Oxford. In April 2024, Dr. Peters was a visiting professor at the University of Copenhagen and IN THE SAME SEA, where he participated in our workshop Inter-Island Connections in the Lesser Antilles, collaborated with the ITSS team members and gave a public lecture on the polyglot, cross-imperial and interconnected Greater Southern Caribbean. In this interview, Dr. Peters tells more about his research and his way into history.
Q: What sparked your interest and made you want to become a historian?
Coming through the secondary school system in Trinidad and Tobago, History was always one of my favourite subjects. At one point, I wanted to be a lawyer, but it didn’t quite work out. And so I decided to do history and thought I might transfer over into law, but after the first year, I just kept falling in love with history.
To study history is to study human beings, to study a lot about who we are. I always felt it was very interesting to see how people have grappled with all these major issues and lessons could be learnt for the future. I should mention Eric Williams, who was the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, but also a historian. Williams was trained at Oxford, and I think I took a liking to his career as a historian and in particular his book Capitalism and Slavery. I won a Caribbean-wide essay competition called the School Bags Essay Competition, named after something Eric Williams said about the future of the nation being in the school bags of our children, essentially. And I think that all of these things just show the passion I had for history, and made it clearer that I should pursue history as a career.
Q: The University of the West Indies has history departments in Barbados, Trinidad and Jamaica. What characterises the history department at the Mona Campus in Jamaica?
The department of History and Archaeology at the Mona campus was, I believe, the first history department at a university in the English speaking Caribbean. We will be celebrating it’s 75th anniversary in 2025. So, it has a very long tradition, and some of the key names within the field of Caribbean history have been at this department at some point in their lives. We have had people like Bridget Brereton, Roy Augier, Walter Rodney, who wrote the book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and Elsa Goveia, who developed the concept of a ‘slave society’. This is a regional university, and in a sense, I think of the history departments across the three campuses as one. But Mona was the starting point for what is now a tree with many limbs.
Before the development of this history department, history teaching in the region was very much European history. We were learning about ourselves through the lens of a Eurocentric point of view, and it was these people, like Elsa Goveia, who shifted us over into the West Indian tradition; a tradition with a focus on a history that was more centred from and within the region, rather than an external view of the region. The University of the West Indies was in a sense a beginning of an educational kind of decolonization.
Q: In your research, you argue for a broader definition of the Caribbean as well as a combined geographical and imperial approach. Can you tell us more about this approach?
The key thing is that people have this traditional view of the Caribbean being the islands within the Caribbean Sea. Now you will have places like Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, and Belize considered as concretely Caribbean territories or nations, but if we look historically it’s very difficult to define the Caribbean in that very specific way. Particularly during the days of slavery and the early modern period, where we don’t have those set boundaries.
The way we define the Caribbean is very much influenced by colonialism and imperial spheres that separated Latin America and the Caribbean. But back then you had so much movement or fluidity between those places. You also see this movement today with the Venezuelan crisis and lots of Venezuelan migrants flowing into Trinidad and other parts of the Caribbean. There are changing imperial alliances, but there are also people who created networks across empires in substantial ways, like smuggling networks. We have people like Francisco de Miranda who collaborated with the British Caribbean during the wars of Independence in Spanish America and Simón Bolívar, who travelled to Haiti and connected with Jamaica and other places. At other times, the connections are less strong, but on the ground, you always have these social connections and also Indigenous people who kept moving freely across these boundaries and lines, that are not really depicted in traditional territorial maps of the Caribbean.
Q: Has your research taken a different shape with you being based in the Caribbean, compared to doing your PhD dissertation at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore?
Yes, definitely. I studied in Baltimore, then I worked at the universities of Oxford and Warwick, and now I’m here at Mona. At Baltimore, I was in a program that was very heavily focused on Atlantic History, and in the UK there was more of a focus on Global History. These are similar fields in terms of what they are attempting to accomplish, but different intellectual traditions. Coming back to the Caribbean, I’m again grounded in the West Indian tradition with a much more Caribbean centric focus.
Coming back to the idea of definitions, although I’m talking about expanding the definition of the region, it still has to be very centred on the Caribbean. And I think that now being back here in the Caribbean, that it is dawning on me even more substantially, that it is not about broadening the definitions and just lumping it together with these larger mainland narratives of North American History or Latin American History. It’s about saying that there are these overlapping narratives. As far as the history of the Caribbean is concerned, the vantage point needs to from the Caribbean Sea radiating out, so that the specificities of Caribbean History don’t get lost in these larger narratives.
Q: Are there any themes or topics regarding Caribbean history that you would like to see further explored in the future? Maybe something, that in your view, is flying under the radar?
With a broader definition of the Caribbean, we need to see more stories of people moving across empires, cultural zones and sub-regions. We need to know more about the Indigenous people. I think that’s one area that’s kind of flying under the radar because during the colonial period the Indigenous people disappear in the records. But they’re there, certainly in my own research studying Trinidad and Guyana, they are very present but just understudied. And I think we need to see even more stories of individuals and groups of people who are bucking the trend a little bit, and who aren’t fitting in these distinct boundaries but are moving about. Particularly of those moving across islands and mainland territories, studying the reasons behind their movement and broader patterns of migration. I also want to see more focus on the sub-regions of the Caribbean, maybe asking if it’s fair to call them sub-regions, and unpacking the logic behind this a bit more. Also looking at how people interact across these sub regions.
Another thing is that we have all these digital history projects or digital humanities, like In the Same Sea. Whenever people are trying to really get to the voices of enslaved people, we hear that it is difficult to unearth these stories, but now we’re in a period where there’s so much being digitized. I would like to see people begin to really capitalize on these new digital projects, especially those focused on enslaved Africans, and begin to write more stories that gives us more insight into their lives and shift the focus from the enslavers. Taking all these stories and all these new databases should continue to inspire more innovative studies.
Q: Finally, what are you currently working on?
I’m currently working on a project focusing on the greater Southern Caribbean, a region that I see as an intermediary zone across the Atlantic world. During the revolutionary era, the North and South Atlantic are using the sub region as a strategic zone or a kind of rendezvous point to transfer people and information across the Atlantic. The British, for example, are also using Trinidad as a post to try and spy on activities and get information during the Latin American Wars of Independence. If you look at newspapers, more likely than not, you’re going to find some news about what’s happening in Venezuela coming from Trinidad. So this is what I’m currently working on. Hopefully, I will be able to publish the book soon.
What I want to work on going forward is the broader definition of the Greater Caribbean and the sub-regions. Moving from just a focus on a specific sub-region to try and write something that tells us more about the greater Caribbean as a whole, and how the space is shifting over time.
Thank you for the interview, Dr. Peters!