Richard Huzzey

The slave trade and the origin of international human rights law

while perhaps replicating the trajectory of his own detective work in the archives to produce new insights, nevertheless leads to repetition. However, this is a scholarly study that gives a valuable, Spanish perspective on piracy in the Caribbean and corroborates reports of pirate customs. It encourages a revision of William Dampier’s activities and helps to explain the interpretation of events that Dampier chose to give in the published account of his buccaneering circumnavigation. It also provides insights into the government of Spanish America, the development of international law, and the surprisingly wide-ranging trading networks of the age. Lázaro succeeds in his aim of avoiding ‘isolating Latin American colonial history by placing it firmly within Pacific, Asian, and European networks of contact and exchange’.

Women, Dissent, and Anti-Slavery in Britain and America, 1790–1865

of white normativity such a comparison implies, Ernest reminds us that they are in fact coming late to a conversation started by the very writers such analytical frameworks have so frequently marginalized. As he puts it, ‘‘nineteenth-century African American writers recognized very well and intimately the necessity of dialogues between white writers and black writers, and they were necessarily engaged in such conversations in virtually everything they wrote but they also understood the terms of those discourses’’ (p. 146). This book is an invitation to participate in this conversation, whether as historian or literary critic, theorist or writer, and to recognize that the contingent reality of race is in fact constituted by these very conversations even, or perhaps especially, when race is itself the subject of discussion.