PhD Studentship - Slavery and the Seven Years’ War within and across the Caribbean Archipelago in London

Start date: February 2027. King’s College London’s Leverhulme Centre for Research on Slavery in War is pleased to announce the availability of a fully funded AHRC doctoral studentship from October 2026, to be jointly supervised across the History and War Studies departments. We invite proposals under the theme of: “Slavery and the Seven Years’ War within and across the Caribbean Archipelago.”

Project Scope and Research Questions: This doctoral project will explore the relationships between military conflict and slavery in the context of the Seven Years’ War, often characterised as the first global war. The Seven Years’ War has generally been understood as a top‑down military conflict between European powers, played out on a global stage. Displacing this traditional understanding of centre and periphery, this thesis will trace participation in the war from the ground up by individuals, networks, companies and colonial operators across notional imperial divides. The primary research object is to resituate slavery as both a core constituent and production of military conflict. While slavery has figured in important accounts of the Seven Years War, particularly for the contemporaneous occurrence of important ‘slave revolts’ such as Tacky’s War (1760‑61), this thesis will be the first to conceptualise the relationship between slavery and war at the heart of this global conflict.

Within this broad area of inquiry, applicants may propose their own area of focus, primary research questions, conceptual frameworks, methodological approaches and case studies. Projects with a transnational and multilingual focus are encouraged. Some important questions or topics this thesis might explore include:

• Enslaved labour in the military: the official and unofficial presence of enslaved people dispatched by Caribbean plantation owners as island deployments and contributions to colonial military forces.
• The impact of the Seven Years’ War on trafficking and trade with West Africa (including on the internal politics of precolonial West Africa).
• The experiences of enslaved people, whose lives were shaped and influenced by military conflict. Thinking through survival, military experience and the conditions of war can reshape records of enslaved lives, more often understood as ‘freedom narratives’ and ‘fugitive archives’.
• Abolitionism and the reinterpretation of slavery as a political, legal, and moral conundrum in the context of war.

The thesis will use records across company and colonial archives: the East India Company and the Royal African Company, as well as papers in the National Archives Colonial Office Series, the Prize Papers, and the records of the High Court of Admiralty. As a critical historical case study in the deeper (re)conceptualisation of slavery and war at the heart of the Leverhulme Centre for Slavery in War, this project will have important implications for longer durée histories of slavery, colonialism, and empire.

The candidate recruited to this role will be supported to participate in this collaborative research programme. They will be expected to contribute research to central datasets, and will be encouraged and supported to develop high‑profile publications at the cutting edge, interdisciplinary nexus of archival research, applied history, and social science. The studentship can be taken up either full or part‑time. Students should have an excellent academic record. A master’s degree in a relevant subject (such as History or War Studies) is a requirement.

About the Leverhulme Centre for Slavery in War: Nearly 90% of recent armed conflicts have involved some form of slavery. Yet the relationships between slavery and war are little examined and poorly understood, leaving governments, international institutions, and humanitarian actors ill‑prepared to prevent, respond, or address deep, long‑lasting impacts. In a world facing proliferating conflicts, the Leverhulme Centre for Research on Slavery in War (LCRSW) is the first overarching and integrative academic initiative dedicated to understanding the complex, pervasive, and persistent slavery‑war nexus as it has evolved over the centuries. This dual‑site research centre (led by the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and the Rights Lab at the University of Nottingham) has been established to shape a new interdisciplinary field of study and a step‑change towards the global goal of eliminating forced labour, modern slavery, and human trafficking.

The Centre’s research agenda is structured around four interconnected Research Strands (RS): (Re)conceptualising (RS1), Understanding (RS2), Forecasting (RS3), and Tackling (RS4) slavery in war. Doctoral research projects will be embedded within and across these research strands and their teams, working both individually and as a cohort. Together, they will break down disciplinary silos, integrating methodologies from across the AHRC subject remit—primarily history, literature, law, digital humanities, human geography, philosophy, classics, gender studies, political science, and international studies—with cutting‑edge data science techniques, including Earth Observation (EO) data analysis, machine learning, large‑scale collation and analysis of survivor narratives, geospatial analysis, future‑crafting approaches, and novel simulations known as ‘peace‑gaming’. Students will also have opportunities to collaborate with our institutions’ partners around the world, across the policy, practitioner and academic sectors.

Details of award: The award pays UKRI Home Tuition Fees (£5,238 for 2026/27) for PhD students. The award pays full maintenance for all students both home and international. The UKRI Doctoral Stipend for 2026/2027 is £21,805, plus a London Weighting of £2,000/year, plus Collaborative Activity funding at a rate of £600/year. The student is eligible to receive an additional Research Training Support Grant (RTSG) during the course of the project. The project can be undertaken on a full‑time or part‑time basis.

Eligibility: This studentship is open to both Home and International applicants. However, the CRSW is limited to one Overseas studentship across the opportunities currently advertised. To be classed as a home student, candidates must meet the following criteria: Be a UK National (meeting residency requirements), or have settled status, or have pre‑settled status (meeting residency requirements), or have indefinite leave to remain or enter.

We are committed to welcoming applications from students from all backgrounds. We particularly welcome applications from Black, Asian, minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds as they are currently underrepresented at this level in this discipline. We require an upper‑second class (2:1) honours degree and a Master’s degree at high merit or above in a discipline directly relevant to the PhD (or international equivalent).

Assessment of applicants: Applicants will be assessed by how well they meet the person specification for this position. This may include:

• An educational and research background that matches this research project.
• The potential to work effectively and inclusively with a diverse team of people.
• The potential to take initiative and manage a dynamic and complex workload.
• The potential to develop expertise in new areas related to this subject.
• A demonstrated interest in and understanding of the proposed area of research, including knowledge of current challenges and opportunities.
• The potential to undertake continuous personal and professional development.
• The potential to communicate ideas and findings, verbally and in writing, clearly and effectively.
• An understanding of relevant research methods.

A successful proposal will contain a clearly identified, novel research question, positioned in the context of current historiography. It will also identify relevant sources. Compelling proposals will offer insight into how the candidate may use those sources.

Use of AI: While we recognise that AI tools can be useful for certain tasks, your application should reflect your own thinking, research interests, skills, and experience rather than AI generated content. Applications that rely heavily on AI‑generated content may not demonstrate the originality, critical thinking, and personal insight expected for doctoral study.

Please note it is the responsibility of applicants to request references from their referees and ensure that they have been received by this deadline. All documents should be submitted in either MS Word or PDF format. Interviews will be held in September with offers expected by the end of the month. Following the interview, the successful candidate will also need to formally apply to King’s College London and satisfy its admission requirements.