Books by Brycchan Carey
I have written or edited nine books to date on topics including the cultural history of slavery and abolition, environmental writing, and birds in literature - and more are on their way. Scroll down to see all nine titles and click on the images and links to find out more or to buy from Amazon or the publishers. I am a member of the Amazon Associates programme, so any book you buy earns me a few pennies and helps support the site.
Brycchan Carey
Published by Yale University Press in August 2024.
Observing that almost all descriptions of the slave trade and plantation slavery readily available to British readers before 1760 were written either by naturalists or by travelers with a strong interest in natural history, this book reveals that the origins of abolitionism were as much in science as in economics or humanitarian sensibilities.
Bringing together ideas and findings from a variety of research areas including history, literary studies, and the environmental sciences, The Unnatural Trade offers original readings of some of the most important writings in antislavery and natural history including work by naturalists Griffith Hughes, Richard Ligon, and Hans Sloane; abolitionists Anthony Benezet, Thomas Clarkson, and Olaudah Equiano; and poets William Cowper, Thomas Day, and James Grainger.
Edited by Brycchan Carey, Sayre Greenfield, and Anne Milne
Published by Palgrave Macmillan, September 2020.
Available in hardcover, softcover, or as an e-book.
Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Reason, Emotion, and Ornithology, 1700–1840 is a collection of fourteen original essays by leading literary scholars from Canada, Ireland, the UK, and the USA.
The book examines literary representations of birds from across the world in an age of expanding European colonialism, considering some of the most celebrated figures in eighteenth-century literature such as John Gay, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Anna Letitia Barbauld, William Cowper, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Bewick, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, and Gilbert White.
Edited with an introduction and notes by Brycchan Carey
Published in softcover by Oxford World's Classics, 2018
Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative is now firmly established as one of the world's classic texts. In his compelling autobiography, he recounts his childhood in enslavement, his adventures at sea in the Royal Navy, the way in which he claimed his freedom, and his life as the leading Black abolitionist in eighteenth-century London.
This new edition indludes an up-to-date introduction, notes, and an index and glossary to the people, places, and ships mentioned in the text, and is suitable for students and general readers as well as scholars.
Edited by Nicole N. Aljoe, Brycchan Carey, and Thomas W. Krise
Published by Palgrave Macmillan, April 2018
Available in hardcover, softcover, or as an e-book.
This collection of essays by leading scholars examines the literary culture of the Caribbean region from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, covering topics as diverse as pirates, obeah, medical writing, religious culture, the Caribbean novel, and Caribbean satire.
Literary Histories of the Early Anglophone Caribbean includes an important introduction by the editors defining the field of Early Caribbean Literature.
Edited by Brycchan Carey and Geoffrey Plank
Published by Illinois University Press, 2014.
Available in hardcover, softcover, or as an e-book.
Quakers and Abolition brings together the latest research on the ways in which Quakers turned against slavery in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries in both Great Britain and the United States.
Contributors include James Walvin, J. William Frost, Gary Nash, Emma Lapsansky-Werner, Christopher Densmore, Thomas Hamm, Maurice Jackson, and Marie-Jeanne Rossignol.
Brycchan Carey
Published by Yale University Press, 2012.
Available in hardcover or as an e-book.
From Peace to Freedom investigates the origins and nature of Quaker antislavery in the years 1657 to 1761, revealing the century-long debate that led to Quakers turning away from slave trading in a momentous decision of 1761.
The book centers on Quaker communities in London, Barbados, and, especially, Philadelphia, examining the writings and lives of antislavery Friends such as George Fox, Benjamin Lay, John Woolman, and Anthony Benezet.
Edited by Brycchan Carey and Peter J. Kitson
Published by Boydell and Brewer, 2007.
Available in hardcover
In 1807, the bill for the abolition of the Slave Trade within the British colonies was passed in the House of Commons. This collection of scholarly essays explores the literary and cultural manifestations of this crucial but conflicted historical moment and its troublesome legacies.
Contributors include Deirdre Coleman, Gerald Maclean, Felcity Nussbaum, Diana Paton, and Marcus Wood.
Brycchan Carey
Published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Available in both hardcover and softcover.
British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility shows how both slave-owners and abolitionists made use of a rhetoric of sensibility to influence a reading public thoroughly immersed in the eighteenth-century ‘cult of feeling’.
Now established as a major contribution to our understanding of British abolitionism, as well as eighteenth-century sentimental culture, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility reads poetry by Thomas Day, William Cowper, and Hannah More, novels by Sarah Scott, Laurence Sterne, and Henry Mackenzie, life writing by Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano, and political writing by James Ramsay, Thomas Clarkson, and William Wilberforce.
Edited by Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, and Sara Salih
Published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Available in hardcover and softcover.
Discourses of Slavery and Abolition brings together important strands of current thinking on the relationship between slavery and culture in the 'long' eighteenth century.
As well as including essays from each of the editors, contributors include Frances Botkin, Deirdre Coleman, Peter Kitson, Diana Paton, Johanna Smith, and Candace Ward.
Slavery, Abolition, and Environmental Writing, 1650–1807
Reason, Emotion, and Ornithology, 1700–1840
Islands in the Stream
Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery, 1658-1761
Essays Marking the Bicentennial of the British Abolition Act of 1807
Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760-1807
Britain and its Colonies, 1760-1838
