Enfilade

From Yale UP:

Linda Andersson Burnett and Bruce Buchan, Race and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Colonial History, 1750–1820 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-0300264388, $65. Series: The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History.

In the decades after 1750, an increasing number of former medical students from the University of Edinburgh construed humanity as a subject of both intellectual curiosity and colonial interest. They drew on a shared educational background, blending medicine with natural history and moral philosophy, in a range of encounters with non-European and Indigenous peoples across the globe whom they began to classify as races. Focusing on a surprising number of these understudied students, this book reveals the gradual predominance of race in Scottish Enlightenment thought.

Teaching provided a toolbox of concepts and theories for students who went on to careers as military and naval surgeons, colonial administrators, and natural historians. While some, such as Mungo Park—who traveled in Africa—are well known, many others such as the long-term residents in the Russian Empire, Matthew Guthrie and his wife, Maria Guthrie, or the Caribbean botanist Alexander Anderson are less remembered. Among this group were those such as the Pacific traveler Archibald Menzies and the circumnavigator of Australia, Robert Brown, who are known primarily as botanists rather than as ethnographers. Together they formed a global network of colonial travelers and natural historians sharing a common educational background and a growing interest in race.

Linda Andersson Burnett is a senior lecturer in the Department of History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University, Sweden. Bruce Buchan is a professor in the School of Humanities, Languages, and Social Science at Griffith University, Australia.

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).

From The University of Chicago Press:

Stephanie O’Rourke, Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction: Europe and Its Colonial Networks, 1780–1850 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2025), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-0226841557, $45.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, European artists confronted the emergence of a new way of thinking about and treating the Earth and its resources. Centered on extraction, this new paradigm was characterized by large-scale efforts to transform and monetize the physical environment across the globe. With this book, Stephanie O’Rourke considers such practices, looking at what was at stake in visual representations of the natural world during the first decades of Europe’s industrial revolutions. O’Rourke argues that key developments in the European landscape painting tradition were profoundly shaped by industries including mining and timber harvesting, as well as by interlinked ideas about race, climate, and waste. Focusing on developments in Britain, France, Germany, and across Europe’s colonial networks, she explores how artworks and technical illustrations portrayed landscapes in ways that promoted—or pushed against—the logic of resource extraction.

Stephanie O’Rourke is a senior lecturer in art history at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. She is the author of Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction
1  The French Landscape and the Colonial Forest
2  Mining Romanticism and the Abyss of Time
3  How to Scale a Volcano
4  Human Resources
Conclusion

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

From Boydell & Brewer:

Markman Ellis and Jack Orchard, eds., Bluestockings and Landscape in Eighteenth-Century Britain: The Prospect of Improvement (London: Boydell Press, 2025), 292 pages, ISBN: 978-1837650507, £85. Available as an ebook for £19. Studies in the Eighteenth Century series, Volume 16.

Situated within the broader context of eighteenth-century intellectual and cultural history, this collection redefines the role of the Bluestocking circle in shaping Britain’s landscapes and social ideals. Against the backdrop of Whiggish notions of ‘improvement’—encompassing agricultural innovation, aesthetic refinement, and moral progress—it explores how women such as Elizabeth Montagu, Mary Delany, and Elizabeth Carter navigated the intersections of polite sociability, intellectual production, and estate management. Their contributions reveal a dynamic interplay between cultural critique and practical reform, positioning them as active participants in the period’s debates on land, labour, and national identity.

Drawing on insights from the Elizabeth Montagu’s Correspondence Online (EMCO) project, these essays uncover the creative and social tensions embedded in iconic estates such as Montagu’s Sandleford and Lord Lyttelton’s Hagley Hall. They delve into the poetic and philosophical musings of James Woodhouse, the sociable artistry of Mary Delany, and the symbolic landscapes of Wrest Park. By examining correspondence, poetry, visual arts, and cartography, this volume offers an unprecedented exploration of the ways Bluestocking women engaged with and redefined the designed landscape as a site of intellectual and environmental innovation. This interdisciplinary collection reshapes the historiography of gender, environment, and cultural progress, offering fresh insights into the enduring significance of eighteenth-century landscapes and the intellectual communities that shaped them.

Markman Ellis is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at Queen Mary University of London.
Jack Orchard is Content Editor of the Electronic Enlightenment project based at the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford.

c o n t e n t s

List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements

Foreword: ‘Bringing Elizabeth Montagu to the World’ — Joanna Barker and Nicole Pohl
Introduction: ‘The Prospect of Improvement: Bluestockings and Landscape in Eighteenth-Century Britain’ — Markman Ellis and Jack Orchard

Section One
1  Idioms of Improvement: Gender and Social Relations on the Montagu Estates, 1730–1800 — Steve Hindle
2  Religious Faith, Class Politics, and Equitable Progress: James Woodhouse and Elizabeth Montagu’s Contending Visions of Improvement — Adam Bridgen and Steve Van Hagen
3  Cultivating Wilderness — Ve-Yin Tee

Section Two
4  ‘Another Little Excursion’: On Tour with Mrs Montagu and Lord Lyttelton — Michael Cousins
5  Cultivating Land, Literature, Letters: Textualities of Improvement in Elizabeth Montagu’s Travels in Scotland — Millie Schurch
6  ‘She had no eyes nor understanding to see that it was not a common vulgar garden’: Mary Delany’s Landscapes of Improvement — Kristina Decker
7  Ladies of Landscape: The Discovery of Lady Harriett Garnier’s ferme ornée at Rookesbury, Hampshire — Rosemary Baird Andreae

Section Three
8  ‘The Genius of Rest … those Happy Groves Inspired’: Literary Composition, Coterie Sociability, and the Gardens at Wrest Park — Jemima Hubberstey
9  ‘Fate Led Me from my Lov’d Retreat’: The City and the Country in Elizabeth Harcourt’s Writings — Mary Chadwick
10  ‘Death’s Refreshing Shade’: Elizabeth Carter, ‘Church-yard Poetry’ and Contemplative Retirement in the Gardens of the Dead — James Metcalf

Afterword: Bluestocking Landscapes — Stephen Bending

Bibliography

The four central musicians are not from the eighteenth century, but the instruments are! From Simon & Schuster:

Kate Kennedy, Cello: A Journey through Silence to Sound (New York: Pegasus Books, 2024), 480 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1639367504, $35.

A cello has no language, yet it possesses a vocabulary wide enough to tell, bear witness, and make connections across time and continents—a feat brought to life in this brilliant new book.

In this luminous narrative, Kate Kennedy, a writer and cellist herself, weaves together the story of four cellists who suffered various forms of persecution, injury, and misfortune. The stories are those of the forgotten Jewish cellist Pál Hermann, who is likely to have been murdered by the Nazis in Lithuania during the Holocaust; Lise Cristiani, another forgotten performer, who is considered to be the first female professional cello soloist and who embarked on an epic concert tour of Siberia in the 1850s taking with her a Stradivarius cello that can be seen to this day in a museum in Cremona in northern Italy; Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who played in the orchestra at Auschwitz and survived spells in both that camp and in Bergen-Belsen; and Amedeo Baldovino of the Trieste piano trio, whose ‘Mara’ Stradivarius was lost in a shipwreck in the River Plate between Buenos Aires and Uruguay but later recovered from the water and repaired.

Kate Kennedy is one of the foremost critics of twentieth-century music of her generation and is frequently heard on Radio 3. She is an Associate of the English Faculty at Oxford, where she lectures on twentieth-century literature and biography. She is the author of Dweller in Shadows: A Life of Ivor Gurney. She is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Supernumerary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, co-director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, and director of the Centre for the Study of Women Composers.