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Is the United States an empire? Scholars of United States foreign relations will be well familiar with the debates that provide the background to James G. Morgan’s stimulating new monograph on foreign policy revisionism.
Over the past 15 years, a substantial, diverse group of scholars has worked to develop the concept of the ‘British world’. They have explored the various and varied connections that linked Britain with a wider British diaspora. The focus has been predominantly on the so-called ‘colonies of settlement’ or ‘white Dominions’: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.
Slavery defined the Atlantic world. African forced labour produced the primary materials that drove European mercantile economies. The plantation complex lay at the core of societies from Brazil and the West Indies to the American mainland and West Africa.
Ireland’s protracted struggle for freedom from British rule has long occupied an important place in American imaginations. Few historians, however, have treated America’s sympathy for Ireland as a matter of formal state-to-state diplomacy.
John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, features briefly in most accounts of the American Revolution. White slave-holders, in Dunmore’s colony and elsewhere, regarded him as a malign threat. George Washington, Virginia gentleman and planter, as well as commander of the Continental army, was among the many who denounced the governor as the devil incarnate.
This book is a study of the exercise of imperial power in the early modern era and the way authorities at all levels moved, expelled, and transported people within the British Empire. Morgan and Rushton investigate some of the processes by which a wide variety of peoples under many different circumstances were forcibly moved.
Eslanda Goode Robeson has lived under the shadow of her superstar singer, actor, and political pioneer husband, Paul Robeson for decades. However, Eslanda, known as Essie, was a dedicated activist intellectual, prolific writer, powerful orator, and world traveller.
From the time that college students Bobby Seale and Huey Newton armed themselves and announced that they were going to patrol the police and fight police brutality, a cultural match was lit that sparked a revolution.
At the centre of this rich, provocative book is a body of water and a steampunk contraption. In the 19th century, the Mississippi River loomed large in the American imagination; a waterway of immense power and possibility which sliced through the North American continent.
The past year has seen an embarrassment of riches for those interested in the history of slavery and abolition.