Enfilade

From Yale UP (with a paperback edition scheduled for publication in January) . . .

Nicola Moorby, Turner and Constable: Art, Life, Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-0300266481, $35.

Born just fourteen months apart, one in London and the other in rural Suffolk, J.M.W. Turner and John Constable went on to change the face of British art. The two men have routinely been seen as polar opposites, not least by their peers. Differing in temperament, background, beliefs, and vision, they created images as dissimilar as their personalities.

Yet in many ways they were fellow travellers. As children of the late eighteenth century, both faced the same challenges and opportunities. Above all, they shared common cause as champions of a distinctively British art. Through their work, they fought for the recognition and appreciation of landscape painting—and in doing so ensured their reputations were forever intertwined and interlinked. Nicola Moorby offers us a fresh perspective on two extraordinary artists, uncovering the layers of fiction that have embellished and disguised their greatest achievements. For Turner & Constable is not just a tale of two artists; it is also the story of the triumph of landscape painting.

Nicola Moorby is an independent art historian and curator specialising in British art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly J.M.W. Turner, British watercolour, and early British modernism.

From Yale UP:

Amy Watson, Patriots Before Revolution: The Rise of Party Politics in the British Atlantic, 1714–1763 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025), 344 pages, ISBN: 978-0300263213, $65. Series: The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History

A new history of the Patriot movement before the American Revolution, tracing its origins to reform movements in British politics

The American revolutionaries—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John and Abigail Adams—called themselves Patriots. But what exactly did it mean to be a Patriot? Historian Amy Watson locates the origins of Patriotism in British politics of the early eighteenth century, showing that the label ‘Patriot’ was first adopted by a network of British politicians with radical ideas about the principles and purpose of the British Empire. The early Patriots’ ideological mission was not American independence but, rather, imperial reform: Patriots sought to create a British Empire that was militant, expansionist, confederal, and free.

Over the course of the next half century, these British reformers used print media and grassroots mobilization efforts to build an empire-wide political party with adherents in London, Edinburgh, New York City, and the new colony of Georgia. While building this party, the Patriots’ advocacy drew Britons into a series of violent political conflicts over taxes and civil liberty, as well as three expansive global wars, the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739–48), the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48), and the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). Patriot ideas and organizations came to divide Britons on increasingly sharp political lines, laying the groundwork for the revolutionary decades to come.

Amy Watson is assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Reviewing the book for The New York Times, Marcus Rediker highlights successes—broadly describing it as “a model of sophisticated research, lucid writing and engaged conscience”—as well as moments of overreach. From Macmillan:

Siddharth Kara, The Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2025), 304 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1250348227, $30.

In late October 1780, a slave ship set sail from the Netherlands, bound for Africa’s Windward and Gold Coasts, where it would take on its human cargo. The Zorg (a Dutch word meaning ‘care’) was one of thousands of such ships, but the harrowing events that ensued on its doomed journey were unique. By the time its journey ends, the Zorg would become the first undeniable argument against slavery.

When a series of unpredictable weather events and navigational errors led to the Zorg sailing off course and running low on supplies, the ship’s captain threw more than a hundred slaves overboard in order to save the crew and the most valuable slaves. The ship’s owners then claimed their loss on insurance, a first for slaves who had not been killed due to insurrection or died of natural causes.

The insurers refused to pay due to the higher than usual mortality rate of the slaves on board, leading to a trial which initially found in their favor, in which the Chief Justice compared the slaves to horses. Thanks to the outrage of one man present in court that day, a retrial was held. For the first time, concepts such as human rights and morality entered the discourse on slavery in a courtroom case that boiled down to a simple yet profound question: Were the Africans on board people or cargo?

What followed was a fascinating legal drama in England’s highest court that turned the brutal calculus of slavery into front-page news. The case of the Zorg catapulted the nascent anti-slavery movement from a minor evangelical cause to one of the most consequential moral campaigns in history―sparking the abolitionist movement in both England and the young United States. The Zorg is the astonishing yet little-known true story of the most consequential ship that ever crossed the Atlantic.

Siddharth Kara is an author, researcher, and activist on modern slavery. Kara has written several books and reports on slavery and child labor, most recently the New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist, Cobalt Red. Kara also won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. He has lectured at Harvard University and held a professorship at the University of Nottingham. He divides his time between Los Angeles and London.

From Yale UP:

Trevor Burnard and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, Republic and Empire: Crisis, Revolution, and America’s Early Independence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025), ISBN: 978-0300280180, $35.

A fresh look at the American Revolution as a major global event

At the time of the American Revolution (1765–83), the British Empire had colonies in India, Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific, Canada, Ireland, and Gibraltar. The thirteen rebellious American colonies accounted for half of the total number of provinces in the British world in 1776. What of the loyal half? Why did some of Britain’s subjects feel so aggrieved that they wanted to establish a new system of government, while others did not rebel? In this authoritative history, Trevor Burnard and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy show that understanding the long-term causes of the American Revolution requires a global view. As much as it was an event in the history of the United States, the American Revolution was an imperial event produced by the upheavals of managing a far-flung set of imperial possessions during a turbulent period of reform. By looking beyond the familiar borders of the Revolution and considering colonies that did not rebel—Quebec, Nova Scotia, Bermuda, India, the British Caribbean, Senegal, and Ireland—Burnard and O’Shaughnessy go beyond the republican, liberal, and democratic aspects of the emerging American nation, providing a broader history that transcends what we think we know about the Revolution.

Trevor Burnard (1960–2024) was Wilberforce Professor of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull and director of the Wilberforce Institute. He was the author of numerous books on Caribbean plantation history and imperial history and served as editor of the Oxford Bibliography Online in Atlantic History. Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy is professor of history at the University of Virginia. His books include An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean and the prizewinning The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire.