The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History

This original and remarkable book will be tough going for some readers, but they should persevere. It's the story of the Johnstones, 11 Scottish siblings whose lives spanned the entire 18th-century British Empire%E2%80%94from Britain to Africa and the Americas. By extraordinary perseverance, Rothschild (a Harvard historian) has excavated the tiniest tidbits about them from a vast array of repositories and collections, and used these shards of evidence to broaden and deepen our understanding of the Enlightenment, commerce, empires, revolutions, nation states, sentiments, family relations, and slavery. Her tale often holds the mysteries of a fictional account, especially about a key slave whose life after shipment to the American colonies is lost in the mists of time. It's also about the rising and falling fortunes of a family and its members%E2%80%94people who seem to have interacted with everyone of importance in the British 18th century. But it remains a story of ordinary people, not kings, political figures, or diplomats. While this is a scholarly work and the very model of the contemporary historian's craft, it's also deeply illuminating, humane, at times moving, and altogether captivating. 6 maps. (June)