Among the first books to consider issues of empire in relation to literary texts of the eighteenth century, Torrid Zones offers a compelling revision of the history of feminism in a postcolonial context. Felicity Nussbaum argues that the need to control women's sexuality in eighteenth-century England intensified as the demands of trade and colonization required an ever-larger, able-bodied population. Describing how women's reproductive labor was harnessed to that task, Nussbaum explores issues such as the production of life, of goods, and of desire. She also considers a variety of cultural practices (usually construed as exotic) in England and the empire, including polygamy, infanticide, prostitution, homoeroticism, and arranged marriages. Torrid Zones includes new readings of significant texts by and about female subjects, including novels by Defoe, Richardson, Johnson, Cleland, Lennox, Sarah Scott, Frances Sheridan, and Phebe Gibbes. It also considers the more broadly defined texts of culture such as travel narratives, medical documents, legal records, and engravings.

Alexander Frater was born to a family of Scottish expatriates on the tiny island of Irikiki in the South Seas. Following his dreams of being a writer, Frater left home, but the call of the tropics compelled him to return again and again. Join him as he dines with the Queen of Tonga; makes his way through two civil wars; visits the spots where surfing and bungee jumping originated; and expresses his love for the region where he is at once a tourist, explorer, adventurer, and native son. From Tahiti to Thailand, Mexico to Mozambique, Frater gives us a richly described, endlessly surprising picture of this diverse, feverish, languorously beautiful world.

The first comparative treatment of settlers' trading, pirating, and colonizing activities in the Caribbean Brimming with new perspectives and cutting-edge research, the essays collected in The Torrid Zone explore colonization and cultural interaction in the Caribbean from the late 1600s to the early 1800s--a period known as the "long" seventeenth century--a time when these encounters varied widely and the diverse actors were not yet fully enmeshed in the culture and power dynamics of master-slave relations. The events of this era would profoundly affect the social and political development both of the colonies that Europeans established in the Caribbean and the wider world. This book is the first to offer comparative treatments of Danish, Dutch, English, and French trading, pirating, and colonizing activities in the Caribbean and analysis of the corresponding interactions among people of African, European, and Native origin. The contributions range from an investigation of the indigenous colonization of the Lesser Antilles by the Kalinago to a look at how the Anglo-Dutch wars in Europe affected relations between the English inhabitants and the Dutch government of Suriname. Among the other essays are incisive examinations of the often-neglected history of Danish settlement in the Virgin Islands, attempts to establish French colonial authority over the pirates of Saint-Domingue, and how the Caribbean blueprint for colonization manifested itself in South Carolina through enslavement of Amerindians and the establishment of plantation agriculture. The extensive geographic, demographic, and thematic concerns of this collection shed a clear light on the socioeconomic character of the "Torrid Zone" before and during the emergence and extension of the sugar-and-slaves complex that came to define this region. The book is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the social, political, and economic sensibilities to which the operators around the Caribbean subscribed as well as to our understanding of what they did, offering in turn a better comprehension of the consequences of their behavior.