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An examination of France’s Atlantic and Indian Ocean empires through the stories of the little known people who built it. This book is a groundbreaking evaluation of the interwoven trajectories of the people, such as itinerant ship-workers and colonial magistrates, who built France’s first empire between 1680 and 1780 in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. These imperial subjects sought new political and legal influence via law courts, with strategies that reflected local and regional priorities, particularly regarding slavery, war, and trade. Laurie M. Wood focuses largely on appellate courts in Martinique and Île de France (now Mauritius) and shows how the courts appealed to French citizens owing to their strategic place at the center of the largest and most dynamic oceanic zones of trade during the early modern era. Through court records and legal documents, she reveals how the courts became liaisons between France and its new colonial possessions, and how subjects used the courtrooms as gateways to other courtrooms in the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, and in France.

Nineteenth-century Britain saw remarkable economic growth and a rise in real wages. But not everyone shared in the nation's wealth. Unable to earn a sufficient income themselves, working-class women were reliant on the ‘breadwinner wage’ of their husbands. When income failed, or was denied or squandered by errant men, families could be plunged into desperate poverty from which there was no escape. This book unlocks the homes of Victorian England to examine the lives — and finances — of the people who lived there. Drawing on over 600 working-class autobiographies, including more than 200 written by women, the book changes our understanding of daily life in Victorian Britain.

London is now a global financial and multicultural hub in which over three hundred languages are spoken. But the history of London has always been a history of immigration. This book explores the rich and vibrant story of London — from its founding two millennia ago by Roman invaders, to Jewish and German immigrants in the Victorian period, to the Windrush generation invited from Caribbean countries in the twentieth century. The book shows how migration has been fundamental to London's economic, social, political, and cultural development. The book sheds light on the various ways in which newcomers have shaped London life, acting as cheap labour, contributing to the success of its financial sector, its curry houses, and its football clubs. London's economy has long been driven by migrants, from earlier continental financiers and more recent European Union citizens. Without immigration, fueled by globalization, the book argues, London would not have become the world city it is today.

From the beginning, French revolutionaries imagined their transformation as a universal one that must include Muslims, Europe's most immediate neighbors. They believed in a world in which Muslims could and would be French citizens, but they disagreed violently about how to implement their visions of universalism and accommodate religious and social difference. Muslims, too, saw an opportunity, particularly as European powers turned against the new French Republic, leaving the Muslim polities of the Middle East and North Africa as France's only friends in the region. This book examines how Muslims came to participate in the political struggles of the revolution and how revolutionaries used Muslims in France and beyond as a test case for their ideals. The final chapter reveals how the French Revolution's fascination with the Muslim world paved the way to Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Egypt in 1798.

Tea remains the world's most popular commercial drink today, and at the turn of the twentieth century, it represented the largest export industry of both China and colonial India. In analyzing the global competition between Chinese and Indian tea, this book challenges past economic histories premised on the technical “divergence” between the West and the Rest, arguing instead that seemingly traditional technologies and practices were central to modern capital accumulation across Asia. The book shows how competitive pressures compelled Chinese merchants to adopt abstract, industrial conceptions of time, while colonial planters in India pushed for labor indenture laws to support factory-style tea plantations. Further, characterizations of China and India as premodern backwaters, it explains, were themselves the historical result of new notions of political economy adopted by Chinese and Indian nationalists, who discovered that these abstract ideas corresponded to concrete social changes in their local surroundings. Together, these stories point toward a more flexible and globally oriented conceptualization of the history of capitalism in China and India.

The Yellow Demon of Fever unravels the story of the uninterrupted Atlantic struggle between humans and often terrifying and puzzling diseases, a struggle that generated a vast amount of information at a time when transatlantic means of communication were significantly enhanced. It seeks to demonstrate that while the enforcement of abolitionist policies in the Atlantic contributed to the eventual ending of the transatlantic slave trade, it also led to an increase in the suffering of those who were enslaved and sent into the transatlantic slave trade. The book also argues that slave traders’ worries about the health of their human cargoes, as well as anti–slave trade patrol officers’ concerns about the health of their prizes—both related to the maximization of profits—generated transatlantic discussions and dialogues about the diseases they encountered and the best ways to fight them. The Yellow Demon of Fever exhaustively examines the personal experiences of ordinary Atlantic people who were daily exposed to deadly and debilitating diseases and illnesses, and who were forced to resist and fight them as best they could, often sharing old and new knowledge on the characteristics of these deadly enemies and on how to confront them. Ultimately, it argues that the ways in which these historical actors dealt with and fought against a bewildering array of diseases were central elements in the transformations of medical cultures that took place in the illegal period throughout the Atlantic world.