In October of 1756 Sarah Folkes wrote home to her children in London from Jamaica. Posted on the ship Europa, bound for London, her letter was one of around 350 that were never delivered due to an act of war; they remain together today in the National Archives in London.In Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times Sheryllynne Haggerty closely reads and analyses this collection of correspondence, exploring the everyday lives of poor and middling whites, free people of c...

This collection explores the multifaceted relationship between letters and bodies in the long eighteenth century, featuring a broad selection of women's and men’s letters written from and to Britain, North America, Europe, India and the Caribbean, from the labouring poor to the landed elite.In eleven chapters, scholars from various disciplines draw on different methodological approaches that include close readings of single letters, social historical analyses of large corpora and a...

Reexamining a seminal work on British capitalism and Caribbean slavery and its continuing reverberations in the twenty-first centuryEric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944), with its insightful and provocative theses about the relationship between Caribbean slavery and the growth of the British economy and the Industrial Revolution, has proved an enduring and controversial book. Never out of print since its publication, it is constantly being reevalua...