About

Brett Rushforth is a scholar of the early modern Atlantic world whose research focuses on comparative slavery, Native North America, and French colonialism and empire. He has published widely on early modern colonialism, slavery, material culture, legal history, and religion.

His first book, Colonial North America and the Atlantic World: A History in Documents (co-edited with Paul W. Mapp), uses primary documents to trace the history of North America in its Atlantic context from the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries.

His second book, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France, examined the enslavement of American Indians by French colonists and their Native allies, tracing the dynamic interplay between Native systems of captivity and slavery and French plantation-based racial slavery. In 2013, Bonds of Alliance was named the best book on American social history by the Organization of American Historians (Curti Award), the best book on French colonialism before 1848 by the French Colonial Historical Society (Boucher Prize), the best book on the history of European expansion by the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction (FEEGI Biennial Book Prize), and the best book on French history and culture by the Center for French and Francophone Studies at Duke University (Wylie Prize). It was also one of three nominated finalists for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize for the best book on the history of slavery.

He recently completed, with Christopher Hodson, a book titled Beyond the Ocean: A New History of France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolutions, which explores the relationships between Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans from the late medieval period through Haitian independence in 1804. It will be published by Oxford University Press in spring 2025.

Rushforth is Editor in Chief of the Huntington Library Quarterly, a peer-reviewed academic journal featuring original research and new perspectives on early modern art, literature, history, science, medicine, and material culture. He is also a faculty member (by courtesy) in the Van Hunnick History Department at the University of Southern California.

Before joining the Research Division at The Huntington, he taught at the College of William and Mary and the University of Oregon.