Significant study of colonial Caribbean literatures in the context of the high rates of disease and death in the region.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Caribbean was known as the 'grave of Europeans'. At the apex of British colonialism in the region between 1764 and 1834, the rapid spread of disease amongst colonist, enslaved and indigenous populations made the Caribbean notorious as one of the deadliest places on earth. Drawing on historical accounts from physicians, surgeons and travellers alongside literary works, Emily Senior traces the cultural impact of such widespread disease and death during the Romantic age of exploration and medical and scientific discovery. Focusing on new fields of knowledge such as dermatology, medical geography and anatomy, Senior shows how literature was crucial to the development and circulation of new medical ideas, and that the Caribbean as the hub of empire played a significant role in the changing disciplines and literary forms associated with the transition to modernity.

This book debates a crossover between the Gothic and the medical imagination in the Romantic period. It explores the gore and uncertainty typical of medical experimentation, and expands the possibilities of medical theories in a speculative space by a focus on Gothic novels, short stories, poetry, drama and chapbooks. By comparing the Gothic’s collection of unsavoury tropes to morbid anatomy’s collection of diseased organs, the author argues that the Gothic’s prioritisation of fear and gore gives it access to nonnormative bodies, reallocating medical and narrative agency to bodies considered otherwise powerless. Each chapter pairs a trope with a critical medical debate, granting silenced bodies power over their own narratives: the reanimated corpse confronts fears about vitalism; the skeleton exposes fears about pain; the unreliable corpse feeds on fears of dissection; the devil redirects fears about disability; the dangerous narrative manipulates fears of contagion and vaccination.

Slavery, capitalism, and colonialism were understood as racially justified through false olfactory perceptions of African bodies throughout the Atlantic World.

Explores the intersection of Enlightenment ideas and colonial realities amongst White, male colonists in the eighteenth-century French and British Caribbean. For them, becoming 'enlightened' meant diversion, status seeking, satisfying curiosity about the tropical environment, and making sense of the brutal societies and the enslaved Africans.

The institution of slavery has always depended on myriad ways of enforcing the boundaries between slaveholders and the enslaved. As historical geographer Miles Ogborn reveals in The Freedom of Speech, no repressive tool has been as pervasive as the policing of words themselves. Offering a compelling new lens on transatlantic slavery, this book gathers rich historical data from Barbados, Jamaica, the United Kingdom, and North America to delve into the complex relationships between voice, slavery, and empire. From the most quotidian encounters to formal rules of what counted as evidence in court, the battleground of slavery lay in who could speak and under what conditions. But, as Ogborn shows through keen attention to the narratives and silences in the archives, if slavery as a legal status could be made by words, it could be unmade by them as well. A masterful look at the duality of domination, The Freedom of Speech offers a rich interpretation of oral cultures that both supported and constantly threatened to undermine the slave system.