07/28/2026
The Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World Program (CLAW) at the College of Charleston is pleased to announce that Dr. Grant Kleiser received the O. Vernon Burton prize for the best paper presented at a CLAW conference.
Dr. Kleiser’s presented his winning paper, “Monte Cristi and the Massacre River in an Era of Franco-Spanish Peace,” at the May 2026 conference, which was hosted in collaboration with the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era.
Dr. Kleiser’s work focuses on the local violence along the borderlands between Spanish Santo Domingo and French Saint-Domingue plagued the colonial history of the island of Hispaniola throughout much of the eighteenth century. Particularly intriguing about these conflicts was the fact that Bourbon monarchs sat on both Spanish and French thrones, and these cousins signed several so-called “family pacts” that ostensibly made them allies, including during the War of the Austrian Succession that subsumed the War of Jenkins’ Ear during the 1740s.
His work argues that this understudied local fissure in the Bourbon alliance had several significant knock-on effects. In part to help stem the tide of French borderland invasions, Spanish authorities permitted the port of Monte Cristi to engage in foreign trade to supply a local loyal buffer population.
British North-American merchants, in particular, flocked to this port and its vibrant commercial opportunities with Spanish and French settlers. Even though Spanish officials shut down this “free port” when Spain entered the Seven Years War in 1762, these Anglo-Americans would not forget such a lucrative entrepôt.
Indeed, the memory of Monte Cristi lingered in many of their minds after the British Parliament created its own, much more restricted, Caribbean free ports in 1766. Such disappointment over Britain’s failed replacement of Monte Cristi would only intensify as 1776 approached.
Grant Kleiser is a Ph.D. History Graduate from Columbia University studying the early modern Atlantic world. His areas of research include contraband, political economy, commercial reforms, intellectual history, the history of slavery, the American Revolution, and inter-imperial relations.
