History professor Christopher Bischof has been awarded a one-year National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to work on a new book manuscript about 19th-century British imperialism in the West Indies.

“I was thrilled but shocked when I heard that I got this fellowship since it was so competitive,” Bischof said.

Bischof will receive $60,000 to support his work on the book Easy Fixes: Race, Capitalism, and Social Engineering Schemes in the British West Indies, 1823-1865. Easy Fixes explores the British approach to emancipation from slavery in the West Indies and the enduring consequences of that approach on modern forms of capitalism, humanitarianism, and racism.

“Many Britons believed that a few cheap, short-lived social engineering schemes would make the transition from slavery to freedom both humane and profitable for everyone,” said Bischof. “The siren call of easy fixes to intractable problems continues to be evident in philanthropy, development, and politics today. I hope this book serves as a warning about the dangers of this mentality while also shedding new light on the history of British imperialism.”

This NEH fellowship will allow Bischof to take a year-long research leave to complete the book. Bischof, who has taught at UR since 2015, is also the author of Teaching Britain: Elementary Teachers and the State of Everyday, 1846-1906. His fellowship began in July.

“The fellowship will be instrumental to my revising this draft into a final book,” Bischof said. “The process often requires holding all the different chapters in your head at once and sharpening the connections between them so that the big arguments unfold across them.”

He’s visited nearly a dozen different archives in London, Oxford, Kingston, and Spanish Town to research his project. In keeping with his tradition for first drafts, he recently had the campus print shop print a bound draft of the book.

“But there’s a lot of work to go, and this printed draft will help me figure out how all the different chapters do — and don’t — work together,” he said. “It will also help me spot areas where I might need a bit more evidence.”

He relishes looking for the missing pieces. Archival research is his favorite part of being an historian.

“Though by this point in a project I usually know what I’m going to find, I still always come across the unexpected,” he said. “Archival serendipity is wonderful, almost magical.”