Christer Petley researches and teaches at the University of Southampton. His work has focused mainly on Atlantic history, British imperial history, and the history of slavery and emancipation in the Caribbean. He has published books and articles exploring the history of the Jamaican planter class, transatlantic debates over slavery, and the transformations that reshaped the British empire in the period after the American Revolution.

"White Fury tells a highly readable complete story... the volume is thoroughly researched and it is well-illustrated." - Robert Davis, New York Review of Books

"Petley's brilliant biography of [Simon] Taylor (1740â1813)... not only describes the complicated feelings of a patriotic planter whose warm regard for his British heritage was increasingly not reciprocated by a Britain coming to think of planters as evil and retrograde but also captures the many challenges and opportunities available within the plantation economy during the tumultuous years of the French Revolution." -- , Reviews in American History

"Petley mines hundreds of extant letters written by Taylor, as well as a wide range of printed sources, to craft a highly readable account of the aspirations, everyday realities and crises faced by Jamaica's richest sugar planter... Petley has produced a smart, accessible biography of one of the most important slaveholders in the eighteenth-century British empire." - Brooke Newman, Journal of Eighteenth Century Studies

"A subtle, sensitive and marvellously evocative biography of Jamaica's richest and most powerful planter, bringing powerfully to life the brutal but highly productive slave system which undergirded the success of the British Empire in the late eighteenth century." - Trevor Burnard, University of Melbourne

"A revealing and persuasive account of one man's life at the centre of Britains slave empire in the Caribbean. In subtly tracing Simon Taylor's 'white fury' provoked by the movement for abolition Petley offers an original and provocative account of British slavery as it entered its death throes." - James Walvin, author of A Short History of Slavery

"[A]n exceptional book that will become a major point of reference for historians of the 18th-century Caribbean and scholars investigating the sudden abolition of the British slave trade in 1807... White Fury is a powerful contribution to scholarship on the British Atlantic in the age of revolutions, and it deserves to be widely read." -- Reviews in History