Black Ghost of Empire is a rare treasure of a book, that offers both powerful knowledge, and a new language with which to describe it. Manjapra's haunting journey takes the reader deep into neglected histories of oppression, while also illuminating the resistance and joy that Black people created within them. Above all the concept of ghostlining - such a succinct and accurate way of naming what we go through as people who tell stories about history - will stay with me

This book will be celebrated as the first deep drill into emancipation legislations.... The architects of these legislations were skillful craftsmen who sought to build walls to contain the freedom they did not wish to create. It was intended to be a project of delusion and deception....[Black Ghost of Empire is] a massive contribution to the evidentiary basis for reparations. It shows that the enslaved blacks never surrendered; were never given the emancipation they demanded; never received the justice expected; and that their case for justice remains!

A frequently unsettling counter-narrative to the congratulatory strand of abolitionist history

Black Ghost of Empire is one of the most important and timely books I've had the privilege to read. This lucid book details the substance and effect of unjust emancipation laws in Haiti, Britain and the United States, which rewarded slavery's perpetrators and punished its victims. Focusing on how these laws worked in practice, Manjapra's book strips back layers of myth about abolition and its afterlife. It draws clear lines between emancipation processes and their enduring intergenerational legacies of racial inequality

Black Ghost of Empire is a historical, literary masterpiece, which feels like the wrong word to describe a book so tangibly useful and appropriately terrifying. This book, as much as any I've ever read, is superglued to my consciousness, and literally changes how I understand every move in my life. This is different, and so so so necessary

In this powerful retelling of the long story of emancipation, Kris Manjapra reveals why and how European and American nations worked to ensure that the end of slavery would deliver neither equality nor justice. It is a must-read that shatters self-flattering national myths

Brilliant, bold, and wise, Black Ghost of Empire is a groundbreaking intervention on the long history of global Black reparations for racial slavery. Spanning emancipationist histories in North America, Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia, historian Kris Manjapra offers a tour de force about the international and local implications of racial slavery's afterlife. With careful attention to the way in which a global Black emancipationist project has offered humanity a way out of the dead end of white supremacist history and politics, Black Ghosts of Empire is an essential global history of the deep roots behind our contemporary racial and political reckoning

Kris Manjapra's Black Ghost of Empire illuminates the global systems of coloniality and the persistence of colonial empires' logics as they animate our present. At the crux of Manjapra's sedulous accounting is Black peoples' always present radical confrontations with enslavement and provisional freedom. Also detailed are the juridical and narrative modes used by white supremacist states to delay, to alter, to get around demands for full reparation and accountability. Then and Now

Kris Manjapra masterfully juxtaposes the present with the absent, revealing the truth of what once was, by illustrating vividly what was not. Using his own ancestral Afro-Asiatic lineage as the nexus upon which the narrative arch of enslavement and emancipation gyrate, Manjapra illustrates how the enslaved continued to compensate their enslavers through the injustices of so-called "apprenticeship", indenture and colonialism, long after their purported "emancipation" had occurred

As this provocative book argues, emancipation brought with it a new set of injustices: continued prejudice, additional forms of oppression, and a lack of reparation... Kris Manjapra's account tells this longer story, and the ways in which these historical ghosts continue to haunt us in the twenty-first century

Passionate and profoundly engaged... [Davis'] presentation of the great river as Colombia's Mississippi, its fountain of music, the source of its many contradictions...generates an impact that few travel books can muster.

Music and myth, commerce and colonialism, indigeneity and identity: Magdalena is as impressively exploratory in approach as it is encyclopaedic in scope

From palatial Aztec botanic gardens to Qing Dynasty evolutionary theories, Horizons upends traditional accounts of the history of science, showing how curiosity and intellectual exploration was, and is, a global phenomenon

Remarkable. Challenges almost everything we know about science in the West

This perspective-shattering book challenges our Eurocentric narrative by spotlighting the work of historically neglected scientists

A useful corrective that brings us closer to a more accurate history of Western science - one which recognises Europe, not as exceptional, but as learning from the world

The righting of the historical record makes Horizons a deeply satisfying read. We learn about a fascinating group of people engaged in scientific inquiry all over the world. Even more satisfyingly, Horizons demonstrates that the most famous scientists - Copernicus, Darwin and Einstein among them - couldn't have made their discoveries without the help of their global contacts

A provocative examination of major contributions to science made outside Europe and the USA, from ancient to modern times, explained in relation to global historical events. I particularly enjoyed the stories of individuals whose work tends to be omitted from standard histories of science

A wonderful, timely reminder that scientific advancement is, and has always been, a global endeavour

This is the kind of history we need: it opens our eyes to the ways in which what we know today has been uncovered thanks to a worldwide team effort

An important milestone

The freshest history of the strangest science

Ambitious, riveting, Poskett tracks the global in so many senses . . . vital reading on some of the most urgent concerns facing the world history of science

Terrific . . . [Makes] a substantial contribution to understanding the universalizing properties of science and technology in history

Horizons forces me to think outside my Eurocentric box and puts science at the centre of world history

[Our Man is] heartfelt, virtuosic and quietly thoughtful at the same time

Isabel Wilkerson's book is a masterful narrative of the rich wisdom and deep courage of a great people. Don't miss it!

A landmark piece of non-fiction

A briliant and stirring epic

The mass migration of African Americans out of the US south forever changed the country's cultural fabric - and Wilkerson's history of this period is full of sacrifice and hope ...a long overdue account

A deeply affecting, finely crafted and heroic book. . . .Wilkerson has taken on one of the most important demographic upheavals of the past century and told it through the lives of three people ... lyrical and tragic