Hi to everyone in the Pitt Honors blog community! My name is Lilly Taylor, and I’m a rising senior majoring in environmental science with a minor in history. Through the Brackenridge Fellowship this summer, I will be studying how climate change, specifically climate cooling, in the New England region during the seventeenth century affected British colonists’ relationship with pirates.
This project was largely inspired by conversations with my faculty mentor, Dr. Molly Warsh, about the environmental context in which Atlantic pirates thrived and the links between pirates and environmental phenomena described by European colonists in the Americas. While some scholars have noted the importance of ecological conditions, especially Caribbean ecology, on the livelihoods of pirates and buccaneers in the early modern Atlantic world, few works have paid direct attention to the impact of climate on piracy, especially from the perspective of how coastal communities’ reactions to climate change impacted their reactions to pirates coming into their ports. As such, I feel that this research is important because it addresses a gap in our understandings about Atlantic piracy during the early modern period and contributes to a growing body of work that considers the impact of seventeenth-century climate change on how European colonists views of other groups they viewed as “outsiders” such as indigenous Americans and women persecuted as witches. Additionally, as both piracy and climate change are still phenomena that occur today, understanding how the impacts of climate change in seventeenth-century New England impacted piracy could illuminate a framework for addressing the impacts of modern climate change on piracy and the relationships between pirates and coastal communities.
After completing the Brackenridge Fellowship and graduating from Pitt, I plan to pursue a PhD in the history and philosophy of science focusing on developments in ocean-related sciences in maritime communities during the early modern period. I would especially like to focus on the contributions of fishermen and sailors to conceptual understandings of climate and weather in marine environments and/or marine biogeography. While this is a slight departure from my focus on pirates in my project for the Brackenridge Fellowship, I think my research into pirates will inform me of the workings of early modern maritime culture, and the interdisciplinary research community of the fellowship program will help me understand different philosophical approaches to science.
A fun fact about me, related to my interest in pirates, is that I grew up near the sites where Blackbeard and Stede Bonnet were captured! Unrelated to my research, I am an avid baker and enjoy reconnecting with the environment through hiking.