Slavery

Donald J. Trump has sparked some soul- searching among US historians: has this happened before? Does it mean America has changed? Cue the self-laceration, cue the book deals. Two impressive volumes illustrate both agreement and disagreement, both concurring that America represents the search for something — but the jury’s out as to precisely what. Capitalism in America: A History is by an Economist writer (Adrian Wooldridge) and a former chair of the Federal Reserve (Alan Greenspan), so you can guess where they’re coming from. The book celebrates the American thirst for self-improvement and argues that the country has long benefited from a ‘creative destruction’ driven by the market and entrepreneurs.

It’s 1830, and among the sugar cane of Faith Plantation in Barbados, suicide seems like the only way out. Decapitations and burnings are performed with languorous cruelty. Women give birth and are sent straight back to work after lying their ‘tender-skinned newborns down in the furrows to wail against the hot sun’. Esi Edugyan’s third novel does not retreat to softer ground after her last, Half-Blood Blues, dealt with Nazi ideology. Both Germany and Barbados have chapters in their histories when humans were treated like mere creatures. Hope arrives with the plantation master’s brother, Christopher ‘Titch’ Wilde, a scientist, inventor and abolitionist. Titch chooses a slave boy, George Washington Black,

As the great Bossa Nova musician Tom Jobim liked to say, Brazil is not for beginners. This tends to be the case for biographies too: an admiration for the protagonist comes first. But once one has a taste for the flair, language and music of Brazil, the extraordinary tale of the pressure cooker that forged it heaves into view. Five centuries of pharaonic boldness and brutality meander through this hefty tome. In relating the events that shaped Brazil’s vast and unlikely realm, the authors seek to dispel the ‘fairytale’ myths that continue to distort reality. Take cachaça, Brazil’s national liquor. The reader may consume it in a genteel setting in

We’re in Virginia, in the 1850s. A girl called Emily is tormenting her dog, Champion, and her father’s teenage slave, Rawls. Seeing this, Emily’s father, Bob, beats her with his belt and kicks the dog. Of Rawls, Bob says: ‘Now leave him be so he can get about my business!’ A girl, a dog, a slave, and a slave-owner.The owner addresses the girl with words and violence, and abuses the dog. He helps the slave get down from the fencepost he’s standing on. But he does not talk to the slave. He talks about the slave. Thinking this over, Rawls looks at Emily,‘sprawled out and wailing in the grass’, and

Jane Harris’s novels often focus on the disenfranchised: a maid in The Observations, a woman reduced by spinsterhood in the Victorian era in Gillespie and I, and now, a young slave in this third novel. Disenfranchised they may be, but her protagonists don’t lack agency. The narrator of Sugar Money is Lucien, a slave who is barely in his teens and whose voice is startlingly optimistic. In Martinique in 1765, Lucien and his older brother, Emile, are tasked by their French master with returning to Grenada — where they once lived — and smuggling back 42 slaves who are living under the rule of English invaders at a hospital plantation

It is a pretty safe bet that for every 1,000 people who know of William Wilberforce, no more than the odd one might have heard of Benjamin Lay. In many ways this is understandable enough, but if anyone deserves to muscle in on the mildly self-congratulatory and largely middle-class pantheon of Abolitionist Saints, it is the gloriously improbable and largely forgotten Quaker throwback and hero of Marcus Rediker’s generous and absorbing act — his own phrase — of ‘retrospective justice’. There was probably only one period of English history in which Lay would have found himself at home, and that period, along with all the hopes and aspirations it had

Bill Schutt has an excellent subject, and he explores it from a promising angle. Cannibalism has long interested zoologists, anthropologists, historians, criminologists, literary theorists and students of theology and blasphemy — the absurd claim that Roman Catholics were commending it in their account of transubstantiation was a favourite with 18th-century English blasphemers. Few people have tried to bring all these together, and perhaps by the end we have to conclude that there is not much connecting the very different elements at the remote ends of the scale. Still, it was worth a try. Schutt is an animal scientist, and he begins with the simpler organisms. At the bottom of the

‘Short of writing a thesis in many volumes,’ Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote in his preface to The Traveller’s Tree, ‘only a haphazard, almost a picaresque, approach can suggest the peculiar mood and tempo of the Caribbean and the turbulent past from which they spring.’ Island People, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s first book, is an academic picaresque. This unlikely hybrid might be the ideal vehicle for a trip around the ‘American lake’; the Caribbean’s cultures and peoples are also hybrids, legacies of unlikely crossings. The masters, slaves, indentured labourers and merchant middlemen of the Caribbean were the first truly modern societies, drawn and dragged to a hellish paradise solely to serve a global

In 2011 the New York Times’s chief dance critic, Alastair Macaulay, asked: How should we react today to ‘Bojangles of Harlem’, the extended solo in the 1936 film Swing Time in which Fred Astaire, then at the height of his fame, wears blackface to evoke the African-American dancer Bill Robinson? No pat answer occurs. Zadie Smith’s fifth novel is a brilliant address to that question. In the prologue the unnamed narrator, who has recently lost her job as assistant to a Madonna-like star, goes to the Royal Festival Hall to hear an Australian director ‘in conversation’ and sees a clip from Swing Time — ‘a film I know very well,

It is difficult to write well about slavery. As with the Holocaust, the subject’s horrific nature lends itself too easily to mawkishness. This tendency is one that Colson White-head consummately avoids in this impressive novel. The Underground Railroad, set before the American civil war, tells the story of Cora, a young slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia, and her escape with a fellow slave, Caesar, via the Underground Railroad, a secret network of routes and activists that enabled slaves to reach the free states of America’s north. It tells it beautifully. The book mixes genres to sublime effect: a straight parable of good versus evil that sees Ridgeway the

In The Cousins’ War (1999), the Republican political strategist Kevin Phillips argued that three ‘civil wars’ had defined politics in the English-speaking world: the English Civil War, the American Revolution and the American Civil War. The ideological battle lines of 1641 recurred in 1776 and 1865, and not just because the Sons of Liberty and the Yankee industrialists were frequently descended from English Puritans. Broadly, all three revolts pitted Protestants against Catholics, reform against tradition, and yeomen against landowners. Civil war cuts across geography as well as families: Phillips compared pre-revolutionary America to the Balkans. In The Free State of Jones, Victoria Bynum describes the ‘inner civil war’ of Jones