History of Race and Empire

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  Roger Williams and His World

  Roger Williams, a 17th-century English immigrant to New England, was famously banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635 for his “new and dangerous opinions”…

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  European Racism: A History in Documents

  European Racism collects more than 130 primary sources—from religious tracts, legal codes, and government edicts, to novel excerpts, paintings, illustrations, and songs—to help readers trace…

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  Slaves in Algiers; or, A Struggle for Freedom

  As Americans began defining who was to be counted a citizen in their newly-established republic, Susanna Rowson’s comic opera Slaves in Algiers (1794) makes an…

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  Only by Experience: An Anthology of Slave Narratives

  Only by Experience: An Anthology of Slave Narratives collects, in whole or in part, sixteen of the most significant and influential slave narratives in English.…

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  Spanish American Independence Movements: A History in Documents

  The independence movements of Spanish America in the early nineteenth century constitute one of the main junctures in Latin American history. Not only did they…

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  Black Slavery in the Maritimes: A History in Documents

  Many thousands of black people were enslaved in the Maritimes, Quebec, and Upper Canada between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is not surprising…

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  The Melting-Pot

  Israel Zangwill, an Anglo-Jewish author and son of immigrants, wrote The Melting-Pot to demonstrate how immigrants could become good American citizens, hoping to forestall the…

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  A Plea for Emigration; or Notes of Canada West

  Mary Ann Shadd’s pamphlet A Plea for Emigration; or Notes of Canada West is, as the title promises, a settler guide designed to inform prospective…

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  Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African

  A contemporary critic described Ignatius Sancho as “what is very uncommon for men of his complexion, A man of letters.” A London shopkeeper, former butler,…

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  The Female American – Second Edition

  When it first appeared in 1767, this novel was called a “sort of second Robinson Crusoe; full of wonders.” Indeed, The Female American is an…

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  The Turkish Embassy Letters

  In 1716, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s husband Edward Montagu was appointed British ambassador to the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman Empire. Montagu accompanied her husband…

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  Hamel, the Obeah Man

  Hamel, the Obeah Man is set against the backdrop of early nineteenth-century Jamaica, and tells the story of a slave rebellion planned in the ruins…

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  Thomas Clarkson and Ottobah Cugoano

  When abolitionists Thomas Clarkson and Ottobah Cugoano published their essays on slavery in the late eighteenth century, they became key participants in one of the…

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  An Imperative Duty

  An Imperative Duty tells the story of Rhoda Aldgate, a young woman on the verge of marriage who has been raised by her aunt to…

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  The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan

  In 1810, the orientalist scholar Charles Stewart translated and published an extraordinary travel narrative written by a Persian-speaking Indian poet and scholar named Mirza Abu…

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  She

  First published in 1886–87, H. Rider Haggard’s imperial romance follows its English heroes from the quiet rooms of Cambridge to the uncharted interior of Africa…

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  Obi

  “Three-Fingered Jack,” the protagonist of this 1800 novel, is based on the escaped slave and Jamaican folk hero Jack Mansong, who was believed to have…

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  Bug-Jargal

  Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal (1826) is one of the most important works of nineteenth-century colonial fiction, and quite possibly the most sustained novelistic treatment of the…

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  Essays on Race and Empire

  This edition assembles the major essays on race and imperialism written by Nancy Cunard in the 1930s and 1940s. As a British expatriate living in…

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  King Solomon’s Mines

  When first published, King Solomon’s Mines (1885) was an enormous popular success. The narrative follows the explorations of Allan Quatermain, a fortune hunter who travels…

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  The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

  The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano was a key work of nineteenth-century slave narrative autobiography. Written and published by Equiano, a former…

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  Heart and Science

  Wilkie Collins’s later novels are often as concerned with social issues as they are with simple storytelling—but as more and more critics are suggesting, the…