The Edwin Fox

“Highly recommendable. . . . [I]t is the particular strength of Cothran and Shubert’s book to show that it was not only the few well-known and most technologically advanced ships that were instrumental for globalization in the nineteenth century, but also the many unknown and simpler ships like the Edwin Fox. . . . [R]ecommended for anybody interested in world history of the nineteenth century or the beginnings of today’s globally connected world.”—Pacific Historical Review

“A quite useful contribution to filling the ‘blue hole’ in global history. . . . The Edwin Fox is a good read that can serve as an accessible introduction to the history of nineteenth-century globalization both for undergraduate students and for a broader audience.”—American Historical Review

“[A] thrilling read, not just for academics but for any reader with an interest in history, race, colonialism, economics writ large and small, culture, or why things are the way they are—in short, anyone everywhere.”—Victorian Studies

“The Edwin Fox [appeals] to a wide, non-specialist readership, and to all historians interested in the challenges of girding together maritime and global histories.”—International Journal of Maritime History

“A skillfully narrated, deeply engaging account of the shifting currents that reshaped global networks and changed the relationships among nations and their people in the second half of the nineteenth century. The book deserves to be widely reviewed and read around the globe.”—Tony Ballantyne, author of Empires and the Reach of the Global: 1870–1945

“In Cothran and Shubert’s expert telling, the story of the Edwin Fox reveals the great changes wrought by human globalization in the second half of the nineteenth century, skillfully situating individual lived experiences on a single sailing ship within a big, broad history of the era. It should appeal to a wide audience.”—Cian T. McMahon, author of The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine

“Imagine a biography of a ship: an extraordinary life history of a quite ordinary ship, circulating abject human cargoes and rare commodities through the great Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. Cothran and Shubert have given us such a book, and it is magnificent.”—Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Brown University