Biography
Yevan Terrien is a PhD candidate in Atlantic history at the University of Pittsburgh. Yevan’s dissertation is entitled “Exiles and Fugitives: Labor, Mobility, and Power in French Louisiana, ca. 1700–1770.” His research has been supported by the Newberry, Huntington, and John Carter Brown libraries, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University. In addition to revising this manuscript, Yevan is planning a conference on convict transportation and incarceration in the early modern Atlantic world.
Research
This dissertation studies the colonization of the Mississippi Valley in the eighteenth century and the mobility of the workers who built French Louisiana. In a vast area that largely remained Indian country, limited arrivals of African slaves and European settlers, servants, and soldiers resulted in chronic labor shortages. Nowhere did France claim so much territory with so few people to defend and exploit it. Forced to rely on a scarce but mobile and multiracial workforce, imperial officials and colonial elites sought to control their movements. Yet malcontent laborers frequently resisted and reclaimed their mobility by running away. Escaped convicts, deserters, and fugitive slaves defied French authorities, compelling them to revise their ambitions and their notions of sovereignty.
