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Acknowledgments Many people helped me complete this book. I am obliged to the staff at the following libraries: the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, especially Mary Robertson; the Upper Reading Room and Duke Humphreys Library at the Bodleian Library in Oxford; the Vere Harmsworth Library and Rothermere American Institute in Oxford; Lincoln’s Inn Library, the National Archives at Kew; the British Library at Saint Pancras; and, especially, the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library of Colonial Williamsburg, who provided a wonderful working environment in which I drafted the first version of this study. I am indebted to all those who have supported me financially and logistically over the past decade. The Arts and Humanities Research Council, the rector, fellows, and staff of Lincoln College, Oxford (especially Peter McCullough, Juliet Montgomery, and Carmella Elan-Gaston), the Huntington and Rockefeller Libraries, and a benefaction from John Griffin all contributed to the completion of the doctoral research from which this monograph has developed. Subsequently, I benefited greatly from the munificence of a Junior Research Fellowship at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and am extremely grateful to Colin Holmes, the late Ben Ruck Keene, and Sir Tim Lankester for providing a magnificent place to work and think. The School of History at the University of Kent has provided employment as a teacher of history and very generous allowances of time and money to conduct additional research . I thank Kenneth Fincham and Karl Leydecker for this opportunity and their patience in waiting for this book. I warmly record my gratitude here to the undergraduate students at Kent who participated in my special subject course, “Rise and Fall of Slavery in the Atlantic World,” and who helped to shape my thinking in exciting weekly discussions, especially Paul Holder and Haig Smith. My own doctoral students, Oliver Ayers, Johan Garcia Zaldua, and David Veevers, have each offered me renewal as they grapple with their own research projects. Paul Donohoe and Michaela Alfred-Kamara of Antislavery International and Peter Twist and Christina Baxter of the City of London Guide Lecturers Association have all helped me to expand my audience as a historian. The content and argument of this book have been nourished by the new perspectives and mental space provided by international travel. I am grateful to Doug Bradburn and John Coombs for hosting me at their 2007 symposium on Early Modern Virginia at Monticello, Virginia, and to friends and colleagues in Bamberg, especially Christa Jansohn and Stefan Eick. Repeated extended stays in Seoul at the Institute for the Study of History at Korea University allowed me a comfortable and supportive environment to revise later drafts. I am indebted to Professor Min, Kyoung Hyoun and Kim, Seung Woo for that experience. I also thank Martti Koskenniemi for the superbly staged workshops at the University of Helsinki that have provided fertile intellectual ground for a number of my ideas. The supervisors of the D.Phil. thesis that was the starting point for this book, Perry Gauci and Peter Thompson, were and remain perfect mentors and excellent friends. Clive Holmes and Julian Hoppit intervened politely but firmly as my D.Phil. examiners. Their 248 . ACKNOWLEDGMENTS intervention also opened up important discussions about legal history with Jeffrey Hackney and Simon Douglas that have proved critical to my thinking. Perry Gauci’s “Regulating the British Economy” workshops allowed me to test some of my ideas before an unrivaled team of scholars, including Bob Harris, Jane Humphries, Joanna Innes, Mark Knights, Philippe Minard, Steven Pincus, and James Vaughn, all of whom were charitable in their attention. My historian colleagues at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, James Howard-Johnston, Neil McLynn, Jay Sexton, and John Watts, all contributed to the intellectual backdrop against which this book’s central thesis emerged. Colleagues, friends, and teachers who have encouraged , helped, and inspired include Ralph Austen, Toby Barnard, Andrew Beaumont, Richard Carwardine, Richard Drayton, Sir John Elliott, David Eltis, Paul Halliday, Jim Horn, Richard Huzzey, Mark Knights, Paul Langford, Ben Marsh, Joe Miller, Phil Morgan, Lindsay O’Neill, Peter Onuf, Guy Perry, Jim Robinson, Phil Stern, Abby Swingen, Alun Vaughan, Mike Wagner, Carl Wennerlind, Koji Yamamoto, and Nuala Zahedieh. I am grateful to all of them. I must reserve special thanks, however, for George Van Cleve, who from our first meeting almost ten years ago to the present day has offered his compelling energy, unrivaled clarity, exacting questions and standards, and invaluable insights, pointers, encouragement, and friendship. It was his reading of an early draft of this study...

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