Here are 100 books that Sweet Water and Bitter fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’m a writer of Jane Austen-inspired fiction who fell down a research rabbit hole and perhaps I’ll never climb out. Dr. Johnson said, “The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading… a man will turn over half a library to make one book.” The five books I’m recommending offer a window into the long 18th century, the era of the Enlightenment, and the dawn of the industrial revolution. In these books I’ve met philosophers, romantics, and reformers who brought literacy to the underclass and emancipation to the enslaved. These books have helped me place the characters of my novels within a fascinating, consequential period of history.
How did governments spy on their own citizens in the age of quill pens and candlelight? Although Londoners lustily sang “Britons never, never, never shall be slaves,” the reality was that few men could vote, and some were in danger of being dragged off the street and impressed into the Navy. The struggle for democratic reform, however, was met with suspicion by government leaders who feared a revolution like the one in France that toppled the monarchy. Regency Spiesuncovers the hidden world of espionage andagents provocateurs who kept an eye on populist reformers like Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt and deluded fanatics like Arthur Thistlewood. While learning about the Peterloo Massacre and the Cato Street Conspiracy, I was also intrigued by the parallels to our own times.
Sue Wilkes reveals the shadowy world of Britain's spies, rebels and secret societies from the late 1780s until 1820. Drawing on contemporary literature and official records, Wilkes unmasks the real conspirators and tells the tragic stories of the unwitting victims sent to the gallows. In this 'age of Revolutions', when the French fought for liberty, Britain's upper classes feared revolution was imminent. Thomas Paine's incendiary Rights of Man called men to overthrow governments which did not safeguard their rights. Were Jacobins and Radical reformers in England and Scotland secretly plotting rebellion? Ireland, too, was a seething cauldron of unrest, its…
I’m a writer of Jane Austen-inspired fiction who fell down a research rabbit hole and perhaps I’ll never climb out. Dr. Johnson said, “The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading… a man will turn over half a library to make one book.” The five books I’m recommending offer a window into the long 18th century, the era of the Enlightenment, and the dawn of the industrial revolution. In these books I’ve met philosophers, romantics, and reformers who brought literacy to the underclass and emancipation to the enslaved. These books have helped me place the characters of my novels within a fascinating, consequential period of history.
A book about a group of London intellectuals – sometimes friends, sometimes frenemies – who expressed their influential ideas with an elegant style that I find irresistible. (Dr. Johnson strongly influenced Jane Austen, so if you like Austen, you’ll like Johnson.) This book is filled with anecdotes of friendships, rivalries, partying, and bickering, with a fair amount of Georgian bawdy humor sprinkled throughout. You’ll meet writers, poets, playwrights, legislators, and bluestockings. The Club gives you multiple biographies plus a portrait of London in the late Georgian period. Spending time with this book is like spending a few hours with Dr. Johnson and his witty friends at a London coffeehouse.
The story of the group of extraordinary eighteenth-century writers, artists, and thinkers who gathered weekly at a London tavern
Named one of the 10 Best Books of 2019 by the New York Times Book Review * A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2019 * A Kirkus Best Book of 2019
"Damrosch brings the Club's redoubtable personalities-the brilliant minds, the jousting wits, the tender camaraderie-to vivid life."-New York Times Book Review
"Magnificently entertaining."-Washington Post
In 1763, the painter Joshua Reynolds proposed to his friend Samuel Johnson that they invite a few friends to join them every Friday at the Turk's Head…
I’m a writer of Jane Austen-inspired fiction who fell down a research rabbit hole and perhaps I’ll never climb out. Dr. Johnson said, “The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading… a man will turn over half a library to make one book.” The five books I’m recommending offer a window into the long 18th century, the era of the Enlightenment, and the dawn of the industrial revolution. In these books I’ve met philosophers, romantics, and reformers who brought literacy to the underclass and emancipation to the enslaved. These books have helped me place the characters of my novels within a fascinating, consequential period of history.
In Regency England, the first-born son inherited the property, while the younger brothers had to choose between a handful of “genteel” professions such as the army, the navy, and the church. It was these younger sons (such as Jane Austen’s two sailor brothers), who fanned out across the globe and changed the world forever. We learn about their aspirations and frustrations as they struggle to get ahead in a world where promotion was based on patronage, not merit, and corruption was pretty much taken for granted. Muir gives us an appreciation of the hardships of Regency life, even for the privileged classes. I wish that more history was taught this way, with a lens on the economic drivers of human behavior.
A portrait of Jane Austen's England told through the career paths of younger sons-men of good family but small fortune
In Regency England the eldest son usually inherited almost everything while his younger brothers, left with little inheritance, had to make a crucial decision: what should they do to make an independent living? Rory Muir weaves together the stories of many obscure and well-known young men, shedding light on an overlooked aspect of Regency society. This is the first scholarly yet accessible exploration of the lifestyle and prospects of these younger sons.
I’m a writer of Jane Austen-inspired fiction who fell down a research rabbit hole and perhaps I’ll never climb out. Dr. Johnson said, “The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading… a man will turn over half a library to make one book.” The five books I’m recommending offer a window into the long 18th century, the era of the Enlightenment, and the dawn of the industrial revolution. In these books I’ve met philosophers, romantics, and reformers who brought literacy to the underclass and emancipation to the enslaved. These books have helped me place the characters of my novels within a fascinating, consequential period of history.
The story of how one unscrupulous person seized control of the evolving institutions of municipal government to line his own pockets might not strike everyone as seat-of-the-pants reading but Julian Woodford’s account of Joseph Merceron is vivid and still relevant today. The long career of this scoundrel is also woven into the larger picture of the times: the ebb and flow of political campaigns; the British reaction to the French Revolution, the effect of the long-running wars against Napoleon, the rapid growth of London, and the scourge of cholera. Stepping into this world is like stepping into a Hogarth print. This book taught me things about everyday life in London I wanted to know but didn’t know how to look for.
Julian Woodford uncovers the breathtakingly appalling life of Joseph Merceron (1764-1839), gangster and corrupt magistrate, who accumulated enormous wealth while presiding over the creation of the poorest slums in Georgian London.Ruling Spitalfields and Bethnal Green from his base in Brick Lane for half a century, Merceron gave the East End the bad reputation that still lingers today, while the exploits of recent mobsters and political miscreants pale by comparison with his staggering violence and ruthlessness.Julian Woodford's shrewd biography - the first on this subject - is essential reading for all those interested in eighteenth century London, anyone fascinated by the…
As a child growing up in a rural community in the isle of Lewis, there were very few books I read which had any real connection with my local environment. This changed in my late teenage years when I encountered some of the books I mentioned here, together with some works about rural communities and islands in Ireland. I loved the way these books – including poetry, drama, non-fiction, short stories, and novels – opened my eyes and enabled me to see familiar surroundings in new and enlightening ways. The legacy of this still persists within me today.
Of all the books connected to the Highlands and Islands I have read over the past few years, this is undoubtedly the one that made me feel most uncomfortable.
However, it was also powerful and enlightening, showing how the people in this locality – like many others – profited from the slave trade yet were sometimes victims of those involved in its cruelty and hardship. A fascinating and enlightening read.
Explores the prominent role of Highland Scots in the slavery industry of the cotton, sugar and coffee plantations of the 18th and 19th centuries
Scots were involved in every stage of the slave trade: from captaining slaving ships to auctioning captured Africans in the colonies and hunting down those who escaped from bondage. This book focuses on the Scottish Highlanders who engaged in or benefitted from these crimes against humanity in the Caribbean Islands and Guyana, some reluctantly but many with enthusiasm and without remorse. Their voices are clearly heard in the archives,…
I was in my 40s before I began exploring the topic of the British Empire. It came after I realised it explained so much about me (my Sikh identity, the emigration of my parents, my education) and so much about my country (its politics, psychology, wealth…) and yet I knew very little. It turned out that millions of people feel the same way… and I hope I provide an accessible introduction and summary of the massive topic.
Coming in at just over 250 pages of generously spaced text, this is not the longest book on the subject. Nor is it the most famous.
But in efficiently telling the stories of three men – John Newton, the captain of a slave ship, who later became a preacher, Thomas Thistlewood, a slave owner who made a small fortune from a plantation in Jamaica, and the black slave Olaudah Equiano.
Walvin deftly reveals how slavery, like so many aspects of the empire, has been erased from the British consciousness and conscience.
There has been nothing like Atlantic slavery. Its scope and the ways in which it has shaped the modern world are so far-reaching as to make it ungraspable. By examining the lives of three individuals caught up in the enterprise of human enslavement. James Walvin offers a new and an original interpretation of the barbaric world of slavery and of the historic end to the slave trade in April 1807.
John Newton (1725-1807), author of 'Amazing Grace', was a slave captain who marshalled his human cargoes with a brutality that he looked back on with shame and contrition. Thomas Thistlewood's…
I write about inequality in international development, American communities, environmental movements, and workplaces. I’ve been doing this reporting for over a decade. I’ve also worked in global health, an experience that has given me a first-hand glimpse into the depths and texture of inequality we have manufactured in our current world, including within the organizations and movements that purportedly challenge such global inequality. As a reader, I’m equally passionate about immersive nonfiction and fiction. I’ll dive into anything that’s driven by a good story.
I was particularly fascinated with this book because I lived in Sierra Leone for several years, and part of the book I wrote takes place there. But I think that anyone who is interested in the history of colonialism, West Africa, and/or modern capitalism and the ongoing effects of that history will find it interesting.
Sierra Leone is unique in that it was conceived of as a place for freed slaves; the British have long championed this as an example of one of their “good” colonial projects. Scanlan details how this “humanitarianism” entailed reformulating a population, particularly people’s ideas about money and debt, to instill specific notions about what it meant to be “civilized” that still reverberate today.
A history of the abolition of the British slave trade in Sierra Leone and how the British used its success to justify colonialism in Africa
British anti-slavery, widely seen as a great sacrifice of economic and political capital on the altar of humanitarianism, was in fact profitable, militarily useful, and crucial to the expansion of British power in West Africa. After the slave trade was abolished, anti-slavery activists in England profited, colonial officials in Freetown, Sierra Leone, relied on former slaves as soldiers and as cheap labor, and the British armed forces conscripted former slaves to fight in the West…
I'm a historian of early modern Britain and the British Atlantic world who realized years ago that Britain, like the United States, hadn't yet fully acknowledged or come to terms with its involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and African slavery and its global afterlives. Although awareness of Britain's role in the African slave trade and Atlantic slavery has begun to feature more prominently in national consciousness, particularly due to the work of The Movement for Black Lives and calls for an overdue reckoning with the legacies of colonialism, slavery, and racial injustice, much work remains to be done. Using the archival record--as flawed as it may be--to piece together Britain's imperial past, confront calculated historical silences, and track the full extent of British participation in the enslavement of millions of Africans will help to ensure that the histories and voices of enslaved people and their descendants aren't distorted or forgotten by current and future generations.
Based on painstaking analysis of the surviving records of the Commissioners of Slave Compensation, this book provides a comprehensive look at British slave-ownership in 1833, when the British government abolished colonial slavery and paid £20 million to slave-owners as compensation for their loss of human property. After emancipation the enslaved received nothing. Moreover, they were forced to remain on their plantations and continue to labor for their former masters under the apprenticeship system, which was not abolished until 1838. Draper concludes that slave-owning was widespread in metropolitan Britain and that many individuals, businesses, and institutions derived wealth from African slavery.
This book demonstrates that there is indeed a strong case for reparations and it is best read as a companion piece to University College London’s Legacies of British Slaveryproject, an extensive database tracing the impact of slave-ownership on the development of modern Britain.
When colonial slavery was abolished in 1833 the British government paid GBP20 million to slave-owners as compensation: the enslaved received nothing. Drawing on the records of the Commissioners of Slave Compensation, which represent a complete census of slave-ownership, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of the extent and importance of absentee slave-ownership and its impact on British society. Moving away from the historiographical tradition of isolated case studies, it reveals the extent of slave-ownership among metropolitan elites, and identifies concentrations of both rentier and mercantile slave-holders, tracing their influence in local and national politics, in business and in institutions such…
I am a history professor at Ohio State, where I have taught for most of my career. I have always been fascinated by how people in different regions define their own identities, how other Americans perceive them, and how these ideas change over time. Having lived through several wars (as a civilian), I have observed that social and political conflicts on the homefront can be intense in their own right and that non-military events and military events are often connected. In my work, I have published on gender, race, slavery, family, material culture, legal history, and environmental history, from the Revolution through the Civil War.
This book establishes that slavery was central to the Rhode Island economy from the colonial period well into the nineteenth century.
For many years, historians concentrated on slavery in the South, but we now have great scholarship on slavery in the North. Clark-Pujara illustrates how the black community, including the women, struggled against oppression in New England.
Once I started reading, I could hardly put it down.
Tells the story of one state in particular whose role in the slave trade was outsized: Rhode Island
Historians have written expansively about the slave economy and its vital role in early American economic life. Like their northern neighbors, Rhode Islanders bought and sold slaves and supplies that sustained plantations throughout the Americas; however, nowhere else was this business so important. During the colonial period trade with West Indian planters provided Rhode Islanders with molasses, the key ingredient for their number one export: rum. More than 60 percent of all the slave ships that left North America left from Rhode…
I am a social historian of the African Diaspora. I am passionate about writing stories that have never been told. The stories I uncover detail the lives, struggles, and resistance of enslaved people. I am interested in and have written about such overlooked topics as African resistance to the transatlantic slave trade; Maroons in the American South; the experience of African Muslims enslaved throughout the Americas; and the lives of the people deported on the Clotilda, the last slave ship to the US. Much still needs to be unearthed to help form a more comprehensive history of the people who, in countless and remarkable ways, fought against their subjugation.
By placing the American runaways’ experience in a continental perspective, this well-researched book brings a fresh outlook to the increasingly popular topic of runaways.
Besides the North and Canada, the contributors examine the motivations, lives, and networks of the people who looked for freedom in all directions. Taking their lives into their own hands, they found refuge in Southern cities, the Texas-Mexico borderlands, Mexico, which abolished slavery in 1829, Indian Country, and the Caribbean.
For each destination, the contributors study and evaluate the degree of freedom, formal, semiformal, and informal, which these self-liberated men and women were able to achieve.
This volume introduces a new way to study the experiences of runaway slaves by defining different "spaces of freedom" they inhabited. It also provides a groundbreaking continental view of fugitive slave migration, moving beyond the usual regional or national approaches to explore locations in Canada, the U.S. North and South, Mexico, and the Caribbean.
Using newspapers, advertisements, and new demographic data, contributors show how events like the Revolutionary War and westward expansion shaped the slave experience. Contributors investigate sites of formal freedom, where slavery was abolished and refugees were legally free, to determine the extent to which fugitive slaves experienced…
