From Francis Bacon to Zadie Smith, British essayists have played a crucial role in defining and interrogating the idea of transatlantic essayism. Not to be confused with its American form, which has been central to the promotion of exceptionalist cultural ideology in the United States from the Puritans to the present, British transatlantic essayism came into its own in the early twentieth century. Beginning with an account of D.H. Lawrence’s essays and their critical engagement with Americanness, this chapter explores the development of transatlantic essayism in the work of key essayists for whom the Anglo-American context has been of central importance, including W.H. Auden, Christopher Hitchens, Pico Iyer, Martin Amis, and Zadie Smith. What emerges is both a history of British transatlantic essayism and an account of the ways in which it continues to complicate our sense of the modern essay’s development on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond.

Augustus Hardin Beaumont has been acknowledged as a fleeting but important figure in British working-class radical literature during the reform agitation of the 1830s. Little consideration has been given, however, to Beaumont’s past as a Jamaican planter and defender of slavery. Formerly a slaveholder, magistrate, and member of the Jamaican Assembly, Beaumont fought in the French and Belgian revolutions of 1830 before organising a militia to put down the 1831−2 Jamaican Slave Revolt. Ostracised for proposing a gradual scheme of emancipation, Beaumont moved to Britain and became a radical abolitionist despite benefiting from the £20 million fund established to compensate former slaveowners. Far from aberrant, the apparent contradictions of Beaumont’s political career and literary output were underpinned by his admiration for America, the country of his birth, and the influence of Jeffersonian republicanism. He is, furthermore, illustrative of the broader ambiguity within British radicalism’s response to emancipation in the 1830s, which, although nominally anti-slavery, incorporated apologias for chattel slavery, especially in the United States.

The genre at the center of this essay—the Anglophone transmasculinity narrative in the long eighteenth century—was a popular and ubiquitous genre for imagining gender transformation and queer relations to sex, desire, and embodiment. I argue that the transmasculine figure was a crucial one for imagining transatlantic biopolitics, often embodying aspects of transformability long associated specifically with white masculinity in a settler colony. Thus, the genre is arguably more representative for the history of whiteness than it is for the history of either queer or trans imaginative or embodied life in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. However, it offers a compelling case study of a genre that can seem spectacularly hyperlegible for contemporary identification. These texts show how sexuality and gender came to be narrative genres in a print/public sphere with privileged relations to intertwined origin stories of the nation, American literary history, and modern queer/trans identities—and a very useful case study in the limits of looking for queer/trans representation in the genres that seem most readily assimilable into a legible prehistory of “queer American literature.”

This chapter explores the transformation of British responses to slavery during the 1830s through the writing of Frances Trollope. In this decade, Britons declared the abolition of colonial slavery as proof of their superior morals and impeccable manners. Trollope’s travel narrative Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) and anti-slavery novel Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw (1838) participated in the reconstruction of racism as a peculiarly American form of bad manners. Although Black women are virtually absent from Domestic Manners, Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw is notable for its range of Black female characters and its frank exploration of the sexual exploitation to which enslaved women were subjected. Trollope’s belated acknowledgement of the gendered effects of enslavement reflects the sensational impact of the publication of The History of Mary Prince (1831). Trollope reveals a historic kinship and complicity between Great Britain and the United States as slaveholding nations. The reception of Prince’s History among British abolitionists who did not want to acknowledge this complicity demonstrated how well-intentioned good manners could function as a form of racism.

The 1860s opened with a new geopolitical prospect for Europe: Italian unification, achieved in 1861. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, outspoken supporter of Italian independence, tracked the period of transition between the 1859 Second War of Independence and the creation of the new nation-state in her final work, collected in Last Poems[GK8] (1862). Though understudied patriotic poems like “The Sword of Castruccio Castracani,” “Garibaldi,” and “The King’s Gift” look forward to celebrate an anticipated national consensus, they also look back, working through public processes of mourning. Celebrating the unification of disparate kingdoms and imperial territories under a constitutional monarchy might have been particularly resonant for the UK as a nineteenth-century nation-state, as British enthusiasm for the Risorgimento suggests; however, attention to Barrett Browning’s transatlantic publication contexts and political-historical content , as the American Civil War began to unfold, reminds readers that civil strife and territorial dissolution remain ever-present undercurrents to nation-state creation.

The extraterritorial dimension of EU data protection law has inspired conflicts in jurisdiction between the EU and other States, particularly the US, which has markedly different conceptions of data privacy. In terms of processing personal data, the EU prioritises the privacy and security of that data, while the US foregrounds national security, freedom of expression, access to documents, a free and open Internet, and international trade. The EU and US attitudes to privacy can broadly be placed on a spectrum of, at one end, the EU’s focus on human dignity and, at the other end, the US’ emphasis on liberty. These distinctions are malleable and based on generalisations; they are far more nuanced than just a dignity vs liberty dichotomy. Data protection is particularly interesting because it is not nearly a universal value. The EU has an omnibus data privacy regulation and the US has fragmented, sectoral approaches. In the US, the relevant laws concern fair information practices or informational privacy, as opposed to data protection. The US legal system assigns these less normative heft, which is a beginning point for many of the jurisdictional tensions surrounding the reach of EU law.

Chapter 3 examines regional trade networks, drawing on archival records of import and export tax duties assessed in the ports of Veracruz, Havana, and Cartagena. Contrasting regional trade with transatlantic trade—which was larger than regional trade by volume and value and has thus occupied most scholarly attention—I show that ships moved between Veracruz and the Caribbean Islands and mainland littoral with greater frequency than they did between Veracruz and Europe. Shipping within the Mexican-Caribbean was also not entirely a byproduct of transatlantic trade, as we often imagine, but a distinct circuit following its own seasonal patterns. Focusing on seasonality and other “soft” factors, I argue that rather than seeing regional trade simply as a secondary consequence of transatlantic trade, we can see it as a primary means through which people in the Mexican-Caribbean world created material links to one another and participated in a common commercial system.

This essay examines the literary emergence radical abolitionism in the context of the national, hemispheric, and transatlantic circulation of print. It begins with an overview of the present state of literary scholarship on abolitionist writing and then goes on to analyze several interrelated historical-textual events occurring around 1830. They include the publication of David Walker’s Appeal, William Lloyd Garrison’s emergence as an abolitionist editor and spokesperson, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, and the Jamaican uprising of 1831–32.

Chapter 3 analyzes how, within a newly expanded marketplace for print, a combination of manuscript and printed letters helped shape the ways in which the Company of Scotland’s Darien venture (1695–1700) and its subsequent failure came to be understood in cultural memory. Letters in both manuscript and printed form helped establish the company. Letters also served to connect the company directors with the colonists in Darien, and, when published in pamphlet form, they provided information and propaganda about the new colony to the nation back home. After the collapse of the Darien settlement, letters also became the evidence used to shape the cultural memory of the disaster. The chapter traces how, over the course of the eighteenth century, the cultural memory of Darien was erased by the bigger controversies surrounding the implications of the Acts of Union (1707) for the Scottish nation. Lastly, it considers how the rediscovery and publication of the Darien papers by John Hill Burton in 1849 brought them back into focus as a site of cultural memory.

This chapter considers the impact of what Mark McGurl has called ‘the Program Era’ on recent Irish fiction. It tracks the emergence of a new kind of Irish novel moving back and forth across the Atlantic between Ireland and the United States. Taking Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic and Mary Costello’s Academy Street as examples, the chapter proposes that these works indicate the gravitational force of American cultural and economic supremacy in ‘the Program Era’ as the United States has drawn Irish writing into its orbit. However, even as the Irish Transatlantic novel attests to some convergences of Irish and American realities, the form also hints at an autumn or early winter of American global hegemony.

Scott’s lifelong passion for trees is the subject of this chapter. Trees in Scotland’s folklore and mythology, as individual living species, and collectively in the environments that once were the nation’s great forests, are shown to be of paramount importance to his literary and personal writing. Articles for the Quarterly Review and other periodicals, letters to correspondents, including poet Joanna Baillie, and his unpublished personal planting journal Sylva Abbotsfordiensis are explored for their record of Scott’s nationally acknowledged expertise in silviculture, his planting programmes at Abbotsford and his experiments with growing conditions. Using a deep-time framework and recent scientific discovery, the chapter looks back to the first tree species to colonize Scotland after the last great glaciation. Scott’s planting of native species and advocacy of their value to the nation is revealed as a form of environmental reconstitution. Tensions between the aesthetics of planting and agrarian economics are investigated.

Frederick Douglass was perhaps the most successful African American abolitionist to traverse the Atlantic and tour the British Isles. In town halls, churches, taverns, and private parlor rooms across the country he spoke to hundreds of thousands of people, sparking a wave of transatlantic abolition that had a deep impact on the British landscape. While he only traveled to Britain and Ireland three times, the friendships and networks he created, together with his transformative experiences there, shaped, supported and sustained his public antislavery work in the United States for the rest of his life.

This chapter argues that central to African American literature’s “pivot” at mid-century is its redefinition of antislavery’s activist networks “in an autonomous African American cultural and literary enterprise” that not only was shaped by transatlantic antislavery tactics and strategies, but transformed those old networks into new circuits of activism. William and Ellen Craft, Josiah Henson, and Henry Highland Garnet all undertook work that “memorialized and redefined the goals of old antislavery networks.” McCaskill considers not only Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom but also Ellen Craft’s private photograph album as establishing the wider frame in which these texts, and their imaginings of Black futures, could be taken up. Similarly, Henry Highland Garnet repurposed antislavery strategies and causes in his February 1865 sermon “Let the Monster Perish,” before the House of Representatives, by opening with his grandfather’s kidnapping from Africa and going on to sketch his own ability to forge a family with other abolitionists despite that natal disruption instituted by slavery. McCaskill argues that this and other published sermons attest to Garnet’s emergence from antislavery activism to contribute to “an emerging national literary tradition.”

This chapter analyzes Native performers’ visits to London in the nineteenth century, their mobility, and their self-conscious negotiations with the modern world. It emphasizes their resistance to the stereotypes through which impresarios, audiences, and commentators sought to circumscribe them. It considers the visits made by the Ojibwe who traveled with George Catlin in the 1840s, and the performers who appeared with Buffalo Bill later in the century, among others, discussing how they pushed back against the framing narratives of “savagery” and the “vanishing Indian.” It explores in detail the two London visits made by Pauline Johnson, her social and cultural interactions, and the apparent ease with which she navigated the slippage between her Mohawk heritage and London drawing rooms and theatres at Empire’s high point. Distinctive as Johnson was, she comes at the end the end of a long line of visitors who both exploited, and destabilized, familiar cultural stereotypes.

During their transatlantic journeys to Britain throughout the nineteenth century, African Americans engaged in what I term “adaptive resistance,” a multifaceted interventionist strategy by which they challenged white supremacy and won support for abolition. Alongside my recovery of this mode of self-presentation in sources I have excavated from Victorian newspapers, I use an interdisciplinary methodology to (re)discover black performative strategies on the Victorian stage from the late 1830s to the mid-1890s. Performance was only one strand in the black activist arsenal, however. The successful employment of adaptive resistance relied on a triad of performance, abolitionist networks, and exploitation of print culture, and if an individual ensured an even balance between all three, it was likely their sojourn was successful.

In adopting this resistance strategy, black men and women forged a Black American protest tradition in Britain which was based on their literary, visual, and oratorical testimony. Black men and women sought to make their voices heard in a climate dominated by white supremacy; they refused to capitulate and educated thousands of people on slavery and its legacies through physically and mentally demanding tours organized across Britain.

Carmen made its debut in the Spanish Americas when the local networks of opera were at their apex, with a constant stream of singers from Europe and a desire for new repertoires outside the main staples of Italian opera. In this chapter, considering sources from across the region, we discuss four layers of Carmen’s reception in the Americas. First, the reception of the opera beyond the stage, in the form of vocal scores, arrangements for military bands and isolated numbers. Second, the perception of Carmen as a French opera, and the way it served as a vehicle for French opera companies in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Third, the idea of Carmen as Spanish, and how different countries considered that hispanicity as part of their own culture and theatrical expectations. Finally, we discuss how the habanera in Carmen was perceived as part of a larger contemporary debate on the transatlantic popularity of the habanera as a musical genre, its origins, ethnicity and its moral and musical character.