Sarah Eron’s work, with Nicole N. Aljoe (Northeastern) and Suvir Kaul (UPenn), on this volume brings together essays that respond to consequential cultural and socio-economic changes that followed the expansion of the British Empire from the British Isles across the Atlantic. Scholars track the cumulative power of the slave trade; settlements and plantations; and the continual warfare that reshaped lives in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Importantly, they also analyze the ways these histories reshaped class and social relations, scientific inquiry and invention, philosophies of personhood, and cultural and intellectual production. As European nations fought each other for territories and trade routes, dispossessing and enslaving Indigenous and Black people, the observations of travelers, naturalists, and colonists helped consolidate racism and racial differentiation, as well as the philosophical justifications of “civilizational” differences that became the hallmarks of intellectual life. 

Essays in this volume recognize that our academic efforts are driven by our desires to refuse racist, ableist, and sexist cultural legacies, particularly those that are enshrined in the discipline of “English Literature.” This urgency motivates the scholarship collected here; thus, essays address key shifts in disciplinary practices even as they examine the past. The volume thus looks forward to, and models, a rethinking of our scholarly and pedagogic practices.