Research

My dissertation examines how law, land, and power were reshaped through environmental change in the early modern Atlantic world.

In eastern England, the Fens were once vast wetlands where local communities relied on shared access to water for fishing, grazing, and transport. During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, large-scale drainage projects converted these common wetlands into privately controlled agricultural land, concentrating authority in the hands of investors and Crown officials.

The same legal techniques reappeared in English colonial Virginia, where they were deployed to dispossess Indigenous peoples and claim Indigenous lands. In both contexts, law became a tool for overriding existing claims—whether customary rights held by English commoners or Indigenous sovereignty and land use. Officials exploited legal pluralism and discretionary authority to circumvent established norms and consolidate control.

Tracing these legal techniques across the Atlantic reveals a shared repertoire of dispossession. Environmental transformation became the mechanism through which social hierarchies were remade and belonging was redefined.