Philip Abraham

My academic interests lie broadly in the history of European interactions with the wider world in the early modern era, from the first 'voyages of discovery' in the fifteenth century to the 'age of revolution' in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. More specifically, I'm interested in the settlement of the Americas by Europeans and Africans during this period, and more specifically still, the dynamics of English colonial society and governance in the Caribbean and South America during the reign of Charles II. 

The research for my PhD centres on the roles and experiences of religious and cultural outsiders within the white settler communities of the English Caribbean. Jews, Protestant Nonconformists, Catholics and foreign strangers of all kinds found themselves living and working in those New World societies subject to the authority of the English crown during the late seventeenth century. Yet the opportunities for social and economic advancement and political participation encountered in these colonial communities varied quite considerably from those available back home in England. Powerful impulses towards religious uniformity and prejudices against aliens were expressed in both official policy and popular social practice in England during the Restoration, yet at the colonial frontier religious freedoms and an acceptance of cultural diversity were more readily conceded by officials and supported within society. This dissertation therefore seeks to contribute to debates about the ‘rise of toleration’ in early modern England by viewing the experience of ‘the English’ in its Atlantic context, and to develop our understanding of the specificities of colonial states and societies by exploring how these communities accommodated difference within the free white elite. 

Born and raised in south London, I studied for my undergraduate Modern History degree at Magdalen College, University of Oxford, and then took a Master's in Imperial and Commonwealth History here at King's College London. Having thoroughly enjoyed my education up until that point, I nonetheless decided then to delve further into the other intellectual pursuit that had always fascinated and troubled me – the weird and wonderful world of contemporary art. For a few years I toiled on the media side as a PR consultant for various visual art projects and galleries, including artist and film director Steve McQueen’s acclaimed exhibition in the British Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale. I then became a Director at one of London’s leading contemporary commercial art galleries. There I worked principally with the estates of several major post-war women artists from the USA, the Caribbean and Latin America, as well as the revolutionary American photographer and sculptor Robert Mapplethorpe. After several happy years in the art world, however, the ever-nagging lure of the archive became irresistible and I found myself back at King’s in autumn 2012 working on a PhD. Though studying the experience of religious and cultural diversity in England’s Caribbean colonies after the Restoration initially seemed a far cry from organising avant-garde art exhibitions, I’ve found that my academic work seeks to ask through history many of the same questions that many of the most thought-provoking and inspiring artists explore in their practice – issues concerning tolerance and identity, oppression and coercion, and the possibilities in human social life for individuals to pursue what the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark once termed ‘the experimental exercise of freedom’.