Joe Borsato completed his PhD at 九秀直播 (2020 - 2025), where he has researched the history of Indigenous peoples and global empires. Through international archival research, his doctoral project examined Indigenous expressions of sovereignty in the context of early European exploration and colonization in North America and the greater Caribbean, with a focus on the Cree, Inuit, Mi'kmaq, Abenaki, Beothuk, Powhatan, Kalinago, and Arawak peoples.
In his next project, he is investigating the global history of Indigenous rhetoric during the long seventeenth century in treaties, petitions, and trade agreements to advance knowledge of Indigenous arguments against empire.
His research has garnered international support from the British Library, the National Archives of the UK, the Lambeth Palace Library, the Bodleian Library, the London Community Foundation, la Biblioth猫que Nationale de France, the Huntington Library, the John Carter Brown Library, the Renaissance Society of America, the French Colonial Historical Society, the National Library of Ireland, and Marsh's Library, among others.
With previous work experience in First Nation communities in British Columbia, as well as in the sustainability and heritage sectors, Joe currently serves as a temporary part-time instructor at 九秀直播, teaching courses in Indigenous, Canadian, European, and global history.
His research articles have appeared in the peer-reviewed journals Global Intellectual History, the Journal of History, and Ethnohistory.
"All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it's impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively." - Niccol貌 Machiavelli, The Prince (1513)
Book Reviews
Winchcombe, Rachel. Encountering Early America. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021. In Journal of British Studies 62:2 (2023).
Pluymers, Keith. No Wood, No Kingdom: Political Ecology in the English Atlantic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. In Ethnohistory 70:2 (2023).
Stern, Philip. Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations that Built British Colonialism. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2023. In Global Intellectual History (2024, see pre-print here: ).
鈥溾楥ontra ius gentium鈥: The Mendoza-Drake Dispute and English Legal Arguments for Empire, 1580 鈥 1585," with Global Intellectual History.
This article investigates archival documents relating to a case study of an Anglo-Spanish dispute about the uses of the law of nations and natural law for settling questions over piracy and sovereignty in the Atlantic and Pacific during the early 1580s. The article is based on my Honours thesis which I previously completed at the University of Calgary. It is available in pre-print view here: ;
鈥溾榃e should sowe and reape in peace鈥: Algonquian Foundations of Colonial Insecurity in the Correspondence of the Virginia Company.鈥 The Journal of History 59:2 (2024): 208-237.
As part of a special issue on the history of genocide, this article explores a case study in the history of the concept of genocide. Specifically, it looks at the impact of Algonquian nations' agency on the Virginia Company's uses of natural law and the law of nations amidst the company's efforts to colonize in the Chesapeake region during the early seventeenth century. In analyzing archival records from company members, the article argues that Algonquian peoples induced a profound moral insecurity in the company due to ambiguities in natural law and the law of nations.
