U of U Professor Wins Award for Innovative Historical Estimates of Carbon Produced by Early American Plantations

Eric Herschthal, associate professor of history at the University of Utah, and co-author John Brooke of The Ohio State University have been awarded the Forest History Society’s 2025 Theodore C. Blegen Award for “The Plantation Carbon Complex: Slavery and the Origins of Climate Change in the Early Modern British Atlantic.”

The Blegen Award recognizes the best article published in the field of forest and conservation history (other than the journal Environmental History). Initiated in 1972 in honor of Theodore C. Blegen, one of the society’s founders, the award comes with a $500 cash prize.

The award was unexpected but deeply meaningful to Herschthal, a historian of slavery and abolition in the United States. He says, “It’s a real surprise to see this article receive the Blegen Award. John Brooke, my co-author, and I spent years trying to figure out how to calculate slave plantations’ emissions. We wanted to know whether slave-based plantation agriculture in colonial America produced more carbon than colonial commercial farms that did not use enslaved labor—a question that emerged from recent debates about the ties between slavery, capitalism, and climate change.”

Their inquiry,  which uses a carbon accounting “bookkeeping” method to estimate emissions based on historical documents such as diaries kept by enslavers, agricultural reports and comparison documents for other forms of bound labor such as indentured servants, found that “Slave-based plantations in the British Americas not only emitted significantly more carbon than colonial farms worked by families or wage labor; collectively, they may have emitted more carbon than British coal use throughout the eighteenth century. Though our figures are only estimates and should be treated with caution, they suggest that the origins of today’s climate crisis lie as much in slave-based agriculture as with the transition to fossil fuels that began during the Industrial Revolution.”

Isabel Moreira, associate dean for research in the College of Humanities, comments, "Eric Hershthal’s article, co-written with John Brooke at The Ohio State University, is at the forefront of new and exciting trends in the field of history, enabling a contribution to the past while addressing research questions of contemporary relevance. This has great potential significance for how we understand the causes of climate change.”  

Congratulations to our colleague for this recognition!