Catherine Hall is Emerita Professor of History at University College London and a prize-winning author. Her work focuses on Britain and empire, and includes Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (2002), Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain (2012), and Legacies of British Slave-Ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain (co-authored with Nicholas Draper et al.; Cambridge, 2014). Between 2009 and 2015 she was the principal investigator on the ESRC/AHRC project 'Legacies of British Slave-ownership'.

• I. Growing up English: 1. A gentleman's son; 2. The young Englishman; II. The Lineaments of Racial Capitalism: 3. The plantation; 4. The merchant house; 5. Reproducing capital: the Long family; III. Making a Slave Society: 6. Colonizing geographies; 7. Colonizing the state; 8. Theorizing racial difference; Epilogue.

'Once in a while a big book comes along that compels you to drop everything, clear your schedule and focus intently. Lucky Valley is a publication event, a magnificent counterhistory of racial capitalism and an urgent call by one of the preeminent historians of our time to dismantle and redress the enduring injustices of Edward Long's world.' Vincent Brown, author of Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War