BA Book Prize reading list: Marcy Norton’s picks

To celebrate this year’s British Academy Book Prize, we’ve asked all of the shortlisted authors to tell us about the books they’ve been reading. Today, we hear from Marcy Norton, author of The Tame and the Wild, a new history of the colonization of the Americas that places animals at the centre of the story.

Sara Johnson’s Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry's Intellectual World: Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry is a famed Enlightenment philosophe, and polymath, but in this beautifully written and inspiringly original work, literary scholar Sara Johnson reveals that his celebrated intellectual output utterly depended on the labor of enslaved people and free people of color. The elegant books published by Moreau rested on manifold stories of violence. Most importantly, Encyclopédie Noire reveals how African-descended people created their own social, cultural and political despite Moreau’s efforts to erase their presence. 

Kathryn Renton’s Feral Empire: Horse and Human in the Early Modern Iberian World: Based on far-flung archival research, Feral Empire demonstrates the fundamental importance of horses in transforming the Americas during the first century of European colonization. While showing that colonialism in the Americas cannot be understood without taking into account human-equine relationships, historian Kathyrn Renton also illuminates the powerful affective bonds cultivated between people and horses in the distant past.

Christopher Michael Blakeley’s Empire of Brutality: Enslaved People and Animals in the British Atlantic World reveals that a full understanding of the Atlantic slave system requires attending to human-animal relationships. It is not only that slaveholders justified slavery by comparing enslaved people of African descent to animals, particularly dogs, cattle and horses, or that the enslaved were often forced to work closely with these and other animals. Also, as Christopher Michael Blakeley demonstrates in this rigorously researched book, enslaved people also used their relationships with nonhuman animals in their efforts to emancipate themselves.

Find out more about The Tame and the Wild, and the rest of this year’s British Academy Prize shortlist, here.