The Edwin Fox

Approx. 312 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 35 halftones, 4 maps, notes, bibl., index

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-7655-5
Published: October 2023

Hardcover Available October 2023, but pre-order your copy today!

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Hardcover $32.50

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It began as a small, slow, and unadorned sailing vessel—in a word, ordinary. Later, it was a weary workhorse in the age of steam. But the story of the Edwin Fox reveals how an everyday merchant ship drew together a changing world and its people in an extraordinary age of rising empires, sweeping economic transformation, and social change. This fascinating work of global history offers a vividly detailed and engaging narrative of globalization writ small, viewed from the decks and holds of a single vessel. The Edwin Fox connected the lives and histories of millions, though most never even saw it.

Built in Calcutta in 1853, the Edwin Fox was chartered by the British navy as a troop transport during the Crimean War. In the following decades, it was sold, recommissioned, and refitted by an increasingly far-flung constellation of militaries and merchants. It sailed to exotic ports carrying luxury goods, mundane wares, and all kinds of people: not just soldiers and officials but indentured laborers brought from China to Cuba, convicts and settlers being transported from the British Empire to western Australia and New Zealand—with dire consequences for local Indigenous peoples—and others. But the power of this story rests in the everyday ways people, nations, economies, and ideas were knitted together in this foundational era of our modern world. Readers will never see globalization the same way again.

About the Authors

Boyd Cothran is associate professor of history at York University.
For more information about Boyd Cothran, visit the Author Page.

Adrian Shubert is professor emeritus of history at York University and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
For more information about Adrian Shubert, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"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