100 books like The Politics of Empire at the Accession of George III

The Seven Years’ War was a pivotal event in the formation of the British Empire, but histories of the conflict often omit a crucial battleground: Jamaica.

Starting in 1760, enslaved West Africans in Jamaica organized to throw off their captivity. Tacky’s Revolt, as the uprising became known, was the greatest slave rebellion the Atlantic world had yet seen. It was also linked to other, global struggles, both in Africa and between European empires.

In Tacky’s Revolt, Vincent Brown links these hyper-local and imperial stories. I found it particularly useful for understanding the complexities of race and ethnicity in the eighteenth-century British Caribbean. 

The British Empire underwent a profound transformation in the eighteenth century—so much so that historians sometimes draw a line between the “first” and “second” British Empires.

One aspect of that transformation concerned how colonies were governed. Until the 1760s, most British colonies enjoyed strong legislatures, a limited role for the military in everyday life, and the protections of English law. That changed during the Age of Revolutions, as Britain embraced an increasingly autocratic style of colonial rule.

The King’s Peace charts this transformation in an engaging and accessible way by weaving its arresting case studies into an ambitious argument about how modern states exercise authority. It gave me a keen sense of how the empire could simultaneously feel fragile and crushingly strong.

High-school history classes usually tell students that empires expanded at least partly because of their proponents’ greed. But who, exactly, was trying to get paid, and how?

Empire, Incorporated tells the story of Britain’s imperial expansion by focusing on the corporations that drove it.

If you’re on the fence about reading this book, flip to the “Index of Companies, Corporations, and Societies” at the back: the sheer number of entries makes it clear that we can’t understand Britain’s empire by focusing on governments alone. Imperial rule was much more complicated than that. 

Empire, Incorporated makes it clear that corporations mattered in shaping the British Empire. But how did they actually operate?

Virtuous Bankers offers a window into an ordinary workday at the Bank of England, one of the most important institutions in eighteenth-century England. In the process, the book provides new insights into the nature of public credit and the growth of the British state, as well as an engrossing introduction to everyday life in Georgian London. 

While most Jane Austen variations center around Pride and Prejudice’s famous couple, Elizabeth and Darcy, Katherine Cowley’s book takes a completely different tactic. The heroine of her book is the often-ignored middle Bennet daughter. After their father’s untimely death, Mary is visited during the night by a pair of distant relations, who invite her to live with them. Lady Trafford and her nephew are training Mary to be a governess—or so she thinks. I loved seeing Mary in the role of a detective, trying to solve the murder that takes place shortly after she arrives in her new home and discovers what Lady Trafford is really up to. Katherine Cowley’s carefully placed clues lead the reader along the adventure with Mary Bennet, and we get to see new sides of this character that were not explored in Austen’s original novel. Other characters from Pride and Prejudice make brief appearances,… show more.

This novel takes place during the Napoleon Wars.

The guilty conscience, PTSD, and war crimes of a British Captain drive him to seek tranquility in the Scottish Hebrides. Before reading this novel, I knew little about this time period and had never heard of the Scottish Hebrides.

The author transported me to the Hebrides so accurately that when I looked up pictures after finishing the novel they were the exact replicas of those in my imagination.

This novel has an existential heart yet is plot-driven and action-packed with romance and even moments of humor. The flow of prose and the incorporation of dreams into the story carried me to the last page and made me sad when it ended.

I enjoyed commenting on early drafts of this dramatic Georgian historical fiction written by my wife Elizabeth about her great-great-great-grandmother: painstakingly researched and vividly portrayed, it’s about love, betrayal, and survival. Lucy, strong-willed daughter of English landed gentry, born in the late 18th century, married Sam Lord, a plantation owner and fortune hunter from Barbados, at a time when women were their husband’s chattels with no rights even over the children. Abused and imprisoned by him in Barbados, she escaped with the help of enslaved people after giving birth at sea, braving disease and cruelty, and witnessing the abject misery of slavery in her descent from a life of pampered luxury to a struggle for survival in a far-off land.  

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.

Winner of the Historical Writers’ Association Debut Crown Award, Blood & Sugar is a page-turner of a crime thriller set in London and Greenwich 1781. Captain Harry Corsham must discover why his old friend the abolitionist Tad Archer was murdered. Corsham’s quest may do irreparable damage to the slave trade. I live in Greenwich, much of which is unchanged architecturally since the eighteenth century. Walking the streets portrayed in the novel brings alive that world. Slave trade monuments are currently being taken down in the UK and US and Blood & Sugar depicts the beginnings of that emotional and necessary journey.

What were the lives of ordinary people like during Austen’s day?

They were far removed from the elegant folk depicted in her novels. The authors look at topics such as child miners, chimney sweeps, crime and punishment, personal hygiene, and how to do the laundry.

True stories look at the horrors of surgery and childbirth in those days of no anesthesia and little understanding of infection.