The Edwin Fox
How an Ordinary Sailing Ship Connected the World in the Age of Globalization, 1850–1914
By Boyd Cothran, Adrian Shubert

Approx. 312 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 35 halftones, 4 maps, notes, bibl., index
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Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-7655-5
Published: October 2023
Hardcover Available October 2023, but pre-order your copy today!
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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
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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
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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