Jesse Cromwell
Assistant Professor of History
Phone Number:
Email: cromwell@olemiss.edu
http://history.olemiss.edu/2012/07/19/jesse-cromwell/

Key Words: Latin American History, Atlantic History, Colonial History, Comparative Empires, Maritime History, Smuggling and Piracy, Commodities

Research Description: Jesse Cromwell is an Assistant Professor of Colonial Latin American history. He joins the history department at Ole Miss from the University of Texas at Austin where he earned his Ph.D. in 2012. His current book project is entitled “Choppy Waters: Smuggling in the Development of Commerce and Community in Venezuela, 1701-1789.” It examines how conditions of material scarcity and the potential for profit thrust Spanish American coastal inhabitants and their Dutch, English, and French business partners into vast networks of illegal, yet essential, commerce. The project explores how smuggling influenced the social fabric of Venezuelan colonial life by increasing transnationalism, altering slave labor and the slave trade, fomenting popular rebellion, and influencing community standards of criminality. Research for this topic has included investigations into prize court records, imperial correspondence, and print material regarding smuggling at archives in Venezuela, Spain, Colombia, Great Britain, and the United States. Professor Cromwell has given lectures and public talks on this research in addition to subjects as diverse as piracy in the Caribbean and the history of Colombia.

Honors Theses:

Hall, Daniel Louis (2022) Maybe the Real Prize Was the Connections They Built Along the Way: A Legal Analysis of the Role of Privateering in the Creation of the Trans-Imperial Greater Caribbean (full text)

Henderson, Cory (2020) Sunset Piracy: The Ends of Atlantic Piratical Careers in the Age of Sail (full text)