Enfilade

From Harvard UP:

Miranda Spieler, Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2025), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-0674986541, $40.

A pioneering biographical study of enslaved people and their struggle for freedom in prerevolutionary Paris, by an award-winning historian of France and the French Empire.

In the decades leading up to the French Revolution, when Paris was celebrated as an oasis of liberty, slaves fled there, hoping to be freed. They pictured Paris as a refuge from France’s notorious slave-trading ports.

The French were late to the slave trade, but they dominated the global market in enslaved people by the late 1780s. This explosive growth transformed Paris, the cultural capital of the Enlightenment, into a dangerous place for people in bondage. Those seeking freedom in Paris faced manhunts, arrest, and deportation. Some put their faith in lawyers, believing the city’s courts would free them. Examining the lives of those whose dashed hopes and creative persistence capture the spirit of the era, Miranda Spieler brings to light a hidden story of slavery and the struggle for freedom.

Fugitive slaves collided with spying networks, nosy neighbors, and overlapping judicial authorities. Their clandestine lives left a paper trail. In a feat of historical detective work, Spieler retraces their steps and brings to light the new racialized legal culture that permeated every aspect of everyday life. She pieces together vivid, granular portraits of men, women, and children who came from Africa, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean. We learn of their strategies and hiding places, their family histories and relationships to well-known Enlightenment figures. Slaves in Paris is a history of hunted people. It is also a tribute to their resilience.

Miranda Spieler is the author of Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana. She is Professor of History and Politics at the American University of Paris.

Distributed by Yale UP:

Sam Smiles, Turner and the Slave Trade (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2025), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-1913107512, £30 / $40.

While J. M. W. Turner’s iconic painting The Slave Ship (1840) is celebrated as a powerful denunciation of the transatlantic trade in enslaved people, his personal and professional ties to slavery tell a more nuanced story. This book provides the first detailed analysis of Turner’s evolving responses to slavery over his lifetime, from his financial investment in a Jamaican property worked by enslaved labourers to his later denunciation of the trade in his art. Drawing on extensive archival research, Turner and the Slave Trade traces the artist’s interactions with patrons tied to the plantation economy and examines the impact of abolitionist discourse on his work. Key chapters investigate The Slave Ship, its inspiration, and its contested interpretations, while situating Turner within broader debates about art, slavery and shifting public sentiment. Offering a nuanced understanding of how art engages with history’s most urgent issues, this important new study presents Turner as an exceptional yet complex figure, whose legacy is intertwined with the institution of slavery and its eventual abolition.

Sam Smiles is honorary professor at the University of Exeter, and the author of The Late Works of J. M. W. Turner: The Artist and his Critics (2020).