Zachary Sell

Biography

Zach Sell is a historian of slavery, capitalism, and imperialism in the nineteenth century with an emphasis upon the United States and British imperial world. He received his PhD in History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Sell is the author of the Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital (University of North Carolina Press, 2021). Based upon archival research in Australia, Belize, Britain, India, and the United States, Trouble of the World examines the terrible convergence between racial slavery in the United States and colonial projects across the British imperial world in the mid-nineteenth century. The book received the Paul E. Lovejoy Prize from The Journal of Global Slavery.

Sell is currently working on a book entitled Free States: Racial Capitalism in the American Heartland which examines the relationship between racial slavery and America’s heartland through an account of racial capitalism in the U.S. Midwest. He is also researching racial and colonial constructions of freedom in the context of the end of slavery in the United States and Britain.

Sell has previously held fellowships include the Ruth J. Simmons Postdoctoral Fellowship in Slavery and Justice at Brown University’s Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. Most recently, he was the Richard H. Brown/William Lloyd Barber & Lloyd Lewis American History Fellow at the Newberry Library.

At Notre Dame, Sell teaches a variety of courses on slavery, emancipation, and abolition. He welcomes the opportunity to meet with Notre Dame students-- particularly in the Department of Africana Studies-- to discuss shared interests

 Selected Recent Publications

"Compensated Emancipation from the Metropolitan Below: Class, Taxation, and the Slavery Abolition Act," Contemporary British History (June 2026): 1-34.

With Crystal Eddins. "’The Total Subversion of All Rule’: Countering Slavery in Colonial and Imperial Contexts." Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 24, no. 3 (2023) https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cch.2023.a915315.

Zach Sell, Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital  University of North Carolina Press, 2021). https://uncpress.org/9781469661346/trouble-of-the-world/