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Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multi-Racial Jewish Family / Laura Arnold Leibman
Review Date: 25 August 2023
Sometimes (not often enough) an academic book comes along that ticks all the boxes: it is based on thorough research, spanning archives on different continents, engaging with rich and varied source materials; it is held together by a tight set of themes; it is written in beautiful prose.
Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society / Cécile Vidal
Review Date: 11 September 2020
In Caribbean New Orleans Cécile Vidal has brought together a prodigious volume and range of archival research in what is the most detailed social history of the city during the French period.
Edmund Burke and the British Empire in the West Indies: Wealth, Power, and Slavery / P. J. Marshall
Review Date: 22 May 2020
Throughout his lengthy career as a leading historian of 18th-century Britain, Peter Marshall has written extensively on, to quote the title of one of his many books, ‘the making and unmaking of empires,’ and he spent more than a decade editing the correspondence of Edmund Burke.
White Fury: A Jamaican Slaveholder and the Age of Revolution / Christer Petley
Review Date: 17 October 2019
Christer Petley’s book takes the life of Simon Taylor, the richest of Jamaica’s ‘planter class’ in an age of revolutions, to reveal broader truths about the British Empire. At its core, this is a biographical study based on Taylor’s extensive surviving correspondence with friends, family, and commercial allies.
Mandarin Brazil: Race, Representation, and Memory / Ana Paulina Lee
Review Date: 19 September 2019
Asian American studies in which the ‘American’ refers to Latin America have seen a considerable growth in recent years. Building up on the pioneering work of Evelyn Hu-DeHart, new monographs on Chinese Cubans and Chinese Mexicans are now bringing much needed attention to transnational histories that remain relatively marginalised in mainstream English-language scholarship.
Progressivism and US Foreign Policy Between the World Wars / eds. Molly Cochran, Cornelia Navari
Review Date: 02 May 2019
In Progressivism and US Foreign Policy Between the World Wars, Molly Cochran and Cornelia Navari present a valuable collection of essays that address the lasting impact of the Progressive Movement upon the foreign relations of the United States during the inter-war period and beyond.
Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833 / Daniel Livesay
Review Date: 15 November 2018
Daniel Livesay’s first monograph comes at an opportune moment. With the recent release of digital projects such as the University of Glasgow’s Runaway Slaves in Britain database, historical attention has focused in on the lives of people of colour in early modern Britain.
Annals of Native America: How the Nahuas of Colonial Mexico Kept Their History Alive / Camilla Townsend
Review Date: 25 October 2018
It is difficult to believe now that generations of scholars in the 20th century argued with insistence that the indigenous cultures of the Americas were destroyed by European imperial expansion.
Tropical Freedom: Climate, Settler Colonialism, and Black Exclusion in the Age of Emancipation / Ikuko Asaka
Review Date: 26 July 2018
Ikuko Asaka opens this ambitious book by referencing the climatic and geographic rebuttal of black journalist and abolitionist Mary Ann Shadd.
Gabriel García Márquez: An Inventory of His Papers at the Harry Ransom Center /
Review Date: 12 July 2018
Bought by the Harry Ransom Center for a reported $2,000,000, the around 270,000 papers of Gabriel García Márquez’s personal archive – collected in 79 document boxes, 15 oversize boxes, 3 oversize folders and 67 computer disks – provides a literally inexhaustible archive on his life and work.