Global Lives

Miles Ogborn is Professor of Geography at Queen Mary, University of London. His previous publications include Spaces of Modernity: London's Geographies, 1680–1780 (1998) and Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (2007).

• 1. Global lives; 2. The Elizabethan world; 3. Savage tales: settlement in North America; 4. East meets west: the English East India Company in India; 5. Into the Atlantic: the triangular trade?; 6. Maritime labour: sailors and the seafaring world; 7. Maritime violence: buccaneers, privateers and pirates; 8. Human cargo: the Atlantic slave trade; 9. Sugar islands: plantation slavery in the Caribbean; 10. In black and white: fighting against the slave trade; 11. Navigation and discovery: voyagers of the Pacific; Epilogue.

'Today's most enthralling histories tell grand narratives of empires, oceans and peoples but can often lose touch with the human scale. Like some panoramic Plutarch, Miles Ogborn uses parallel lives to illustrate global processes. Global Lives weaves more than forty succinct biographies - some familiar, like those of Sir Walter Ralegh and Captain Cook, others hitherto obscure, like the Madras merchant Kasi Viranni's and the Jamaican slave-woman Sarah Affir's - into a kaleidoscopic account of Britain's rise to world power. Ogborn's remarkable book brings an empire to life through the lives that built the empire. David Armitage, Harvard University